Why Performance Review Don't Always Go as Expected
Have you had a manager who promised a promotion that didn't happen? Or did all the work that was "expected" for a promotion but was passed over?
Welcome to performance review season! Did you just get your performance review back? How did it go? Was it as expected? Let me know in the comments below!
(Teddy the Corgi; South Lake Tahoe, Nevada)
To get to middle management, you’ve likely had a few performance review and promotion conversations. As you progress in your career, the way others view your performance takes on increasing weight relative to how your direct chain of command views your performance. To be clear, your manager’s view of your performance is still critical, but increasingly insufficient. The key here is to ensure that your performance is well understood not just by organizations and teams you regularly collaborate with, but also by teams and people you may not work with regularly.
At larger companies, there are formal leveling guidelines and review processes that managers follow. For example, at Meta, reviews happen twice a year (once as of 2023) and promotions are assessed twice a year. Written reviews are 360° — they include feedback from your team, your peers, and your managers. However, once you get into the actual promotion conversations, the people who may comment on your performance are far more wide-reaching.
This first happens during “calibrations sessions”, formal and informal, where managers across organizations of the same function meet to ensure that the reviews are “calibrated” across teams and organizations, so the same bar is held for everyone. This process tries to avoid the bias that a person doing well on one team could just be average in another, resulting in unfair promotions specific to certain teams. It also ensures that managers don’t miss any feedback from other teams in the organization when they put together performance reviews. This process opens up your performance for discussion and comparison across hundreds of people, if not across organizations (for Directors and VPs). So, it no longer is just about people you interact with regularly, it becomes about your reputation.
Many small or early-stage companies don’t have official performance reviews. However, even though your company claims they do not have performance reviews, they still review performance. Reputation is even more key in smaller companies since most people are aware of others at the company, particularly high-performing aspiring leaders.
What Goes Wrong During Performance Reviews
People who believe they are ready for promotion and have heard similarly from their manager can be unpleasantly surprised when the official performance review is delivered due to unexpected events in the promotion process. The conversation may look something like this:
VP: Hey everyone, I’m Jane’s manager. Jane’s been doing a great job and has been performing at the VP level for more than a year. She successfully launched a multi-team multi-quarter project and has shown that she can handle more scope. Jane has been delivering a great consistently, and I would like to put her up for promotion to VP.
Peer VP: Jane took an original idea from my PM director, Joe. Joe was working on the project, but she stepped in midway and ran with it. They collaborated on the project, but she ended up in multiple conflicts with Joe. I don’t think she handled the collaboration well or deserves full credit.
SVP 2: My PM director is managing multiple cross-team projects and has consistently delivered double digital increases in revenue. He has not yet been promoted. Perhaps we consider him first?
Peer VP 3: When I look at this project and the measured impact, was it calculated correctly and over the right time horizon? Didn’t this other initiative help inflate the numbers?
In this case, Jane’s promotion was blocked due to objections she’d never heard and that may or may not be fully accurate. Sometimes, promotion conversations can take unexpected dives for the worse simply based on the room dynamics at the time. At the core of it, this happens for a few reasons:
There are unexpected vocal detractors in the room
The overall team is underperforming
The manager is viewed as too subjective or not confident enough in their evaluation
One small comment of hesitation from someone with a large amount of influence in the room
To combat this, it’s important to find advocates and ensure your manager or you get critical people on board ahead of formal performance conversations.
First, keep an ear to the ground to gather information about how your team and organization are doing. Make sure when you talk about your wins that others are buying into the narrative. Then, a few months from promotion time, you and your manager should talk to other leaders and teammates in the organization to proactively ask for feedback. This way, you’ll know who will or will not advocate for you, avoiding surprises during promotion time. Knowing whom you must win over early gives you time to invest in building trust and strengthening relationships.
It also helps to enlist other advocates for your promotion. Because your manager is your manager, she may be perceived as biased in presenting the case for promotion. You and your manager should try and find another advocate who will be in the room, ideally with the same if not more influence than your manager. Ask that person to mentor you and help them get to know you over time. Then, during promotion conversations, another person in the room can speak to your capabilities more objectively.
Good luck during performance review season everyone!! Reach out to your coach if you need additional support! =)