What to do if you get a Bad Appraisal
A bad performance review can have a significant emotional impact on an individual. We all like to feel that we do a good job and being told by somebody that they don’t think we do is understandably stressful. The performance review process worsens the situation by design. The formality of the meeting followed up by a relatively formal written document often leads to feelings of low self-esteem, frustration, apathy or even anger.
The most important thing is to take a little time out to reflect on what you have been told. An immediate instinct might be to protect or to appeal or to generally kick up a fuss. This is almost certainly a road to nowhere and whether the comments were fair or not, the only positive way forward is to act upon what you have been told.
You should have been provided with a written summary of your reviewer’s thoughts and comments, along with details of other people’s contributions. You should use this to plan your next steps. Take a pad of post-it notes and go and sit somewhere quietly. Ideally, do this at home, but a quiet meeting room at work will suffice. Write down each individual comment on one post-it. Stick them up on the wall in one of two places by deciding whether each one is a ‘positive’ comment or whether it is a ‘negative’ comment. This is a simple, relatively therapeutic method of focusing on the key issues. Ironically, it can help lessen the emotional impact of what has been said. By working in this way, you will start to feel that you are managing a task like any other.
This gives you the starting point to build a framework of areas that you need to address. Don’t ignore the positive comments but focus in the first instance on the negative ones. Try and group them into no more than four behaviors. If you are told that you are late too often and that you have had too much time off sick then group those together as ‘attendance issues’. If you are told that you don’t work well with somebody on the team or that you don’t share your knowledge, then you have a group called ‘team working’. There’s no point working on too many areas at once. Realistically, you won’t be able to devise a plan that helps you address more than four areas.
These areas should now form the basis of a plan. A simple brainstorming session should give you a list of ways that you think you could improve in this area or ways in which you think you already perform well but need to demonstrate better evidence. Don’t be too concerned about the detail at this stage. What you are trying to do is come up with ideas for discussion. When you have those ideas, you should then seek the opportunity to sit down with your manager and agree a simple development plan. He/she may suggest other things that you hadn’t considered or may suggest revisions to some of your ideas. Ensure that each task has a clearly measurable objective. You want to be able to clearly articulate what you will do, when you will do it and what success looks like.
This isn’t as complicated as it sounds. Imagine that you were told that you don’t share your knowledge readily with others. You might decide that you will identify 3 tasks or processes that you complete regularly and that you will document the operating procedure and then train at least 2 other members of staff to be able to complete them in your absence. Ensure that you agree a deadline (within three months) and then what the measure of success is. In this case, you could suggest that those 2 staff members can cover the work for 7 days at the end of those three months. There’s nothing more to it than that! Your manager knows what you will do, when and what will happen at the end of it.
Ongoing dialogue with your manager is going to be critical. Regardless of your personal feelings, you mustn't let that relationship sour or turn negative. You may not *like* your boss. Your boss may not *like* you but if you can focus on tasks and behaviors related to your job objectives then you will find a workable common ground.
The focus here is on responding to the review by demonstrating how you intend to show improvement to your manager. It’s critical to work in this way even if you think that your performance is much better than has been suggested. Rightly or wrongly, your task now is to prove this to your manager such that he/she sees a marked improvement. The fact is that by responding in this way, you’re already altering perceptions of your behavior. You’ll be demonstrating that you can accept negative feedback and respond in a positive manner. Emotionally, this is often extremely difficult to do, but it is the only way that you ensure that there is a very different outcome from your next performance review. It’s your responsibility to drive this. Rightly or wrongly, only you can change a perception that other people may hold.
