I hate corporate performance reviews. Trying to fit the work you performed over the last six months to a year into pre-defined generic boxes such as “flexibility”, “interpersonal skills”, “creativity”, and so on strikes me as really dull. I doubt I’m alone in this sentiment.

I created some consternation during my first performance assessment at Excella by not filling anything in on my performance self-assessment. All blanks in every field. It wasn’t that I didn’t care. I just felt the 2-3 hours of filling in those generic buckets with work I performed struck me as a useless exercise. I’d prefer using those hours to learn more about Clojure or Hadoop.

Why go through performance reviews at all if they don’t provide value? Well, they are supposed to provide value through self-reflection. It’s just that most people (myself included) half-ass them and don’t perform the self-reflection part because it’s tedious and boring. But if the process is more enjoyable, maybe that will help people to think through their performance.

So here’s what I’m going to do in the future to make the process more enjoyable. I’m going to tell a story. Storytelling provides more value. Storytelling is more fun for both the writer and the reader. It's memorable. Give me a story over a bulleted list any day. And I need to be a better storyteller so I can get better at explaining the results of data analysis and visualizations.

Here’s an off-the-cuff attempt at a performance review story excerpt for the fall (without any sensitive client info).

I glanced at my watch. 2pm. Ready to start this client demo. I wasn’t happy with how the demo the week earlier turned out. Apparently I wasn’t clued in on some last minute changes the business expected. I got defensive when I asked whether I should have followed the conflicting requirements document, wireframes, or numerous emails I received from our business analyst.

I made some changes in the time between that first demo and this one. Right now my part of the system was working well minus a few features I could explain away since we were more than a month out from delivery. 

Fast forward an hour. It went great. Lots of congratulations on a job well done. It was nice to get some positive feedback directly from the client and people who’d be actually using the system. No defensiveness as I carefully took notes when the client asked for small changes to the system. What a difference a week and some self-reflection on how I should handle client feedback could make.

I don’t always handle my client interactions perfectly, but I’ve learned from a few failings so far this fall. This successful demo was the result of of that learning process.

Definitely more fun writing that little excerpt than a bulleted list. Hopefully better for consumption as well. And while not everything will fit well within the context of a story, the outcome of self-reflection from writing the story will make the exercise worthwhile.