Artsy did it’s six-monthly peer performance (performance?) reviews and I got lots of meaningful feedback, including “aww yeah, Ash is great” comments from colleagues and my manager. I want to reflect a bit on the review, my direction, and my goals.
Artsy’s process involves a self-evaluation, peer evaluations, and a meeting with one’s manager. All the feedback is non-anonymous. The evaluations measure performance and teamwork separately, but both of them against Artsy’s values:
I gave myself good marks for performance and great marks on teamwork. It’s a struggle to give an honest, not-depression-tinted review of my own abilities, so it was a struggled to say “I’m great.” I also said that I need to stop taking things so personally and to get better at conflict resolution.
My manager told me that I was being hard on myself, that he was proud of what I had accomplished and that I had full latitude to continue working on new strategies to improve our team’s dynamics. So that was pretty cool.
My goals are to continue to focus on community-building and expand into manager-type responsibilities. I’m not sure if a “manager” is what I want to be, but the skills are important to acquire in either case.
One other note: I dislike awkward situations, like really dislike them. But my work often involves things like disagreeing with others and giving critical feedback to colleagues. Obviously no Canadian likes disagreeing with anyone, but I take it to an extreme. So I’m going to start pushing towards that awkwardness, like a kind of exposure therapy. So look forward to more unsalted opinions and blog posts even more awkward than sharing one’s peerformance review.