I’ve got to do my part of my performance review tomorrow. Been trying to make it work tonight and it just eludes me. I have my KEY RESULT AREAS filled in and my KEY COMPETENCIES marked out but trying to relate everything I’ve done and learned and assembled in the last year in a little box is defeating me.
I actually don’t even know what type of thing I’m meant to write in the little boxes, it’s been so long since I’ve done one of these things. I sort of just want to write the same thing everywhere:
Done all this stuff, more or less.
It’s the more or less that makes it work. Because it’s ultimately entirely arbitrary isn’t it to try and capture the complexity of these relationships between me and other people, between my system inputs and the responses of the system, between my shaking of the spider’s web and the spider’s jerky approach, to try and capture them in a little box and rate it with a letter grade… Except it’s not really about capturing these relationships, is it? It’s about enabling a certain vector of communication. The performance review isn’t about reviewing performance – that happens all the time, in an ongoing way, the manager is always reviewing the employee’s performance, the employee is always interpreting their own performance. Maybe the process is really about manager and employee being able to send some important messages to each other.
So what kinda message do I want to send, I wonder?
No-one puts baby in the corner
In space no one can hear you scream
Send more paramedics
Hmm. Much to think about.