109 Mid-Year Review With Confidence

Mid-year reviews feel stressful when you wait for your boss to define how you’re doing. Liz Jolley shares how to evaluate yourself first so you can walk in grounded, clear, and confident.

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00:00:00
Welcome to the Great Leader Great Mom Podcast, where we trade in mom guilt and burnout for courage, calm, and a whole lot more joy. I'm your host, Liz Jolley, engineer turned life coach, mom of three, and founder of the School of Courage. Here we talk about leading at work and at home without losing your sanity, your sense of humor, or yourself.

00:00:20
Well, this is episode 109, and we are going to talk about mid-year reviews with confidence, because most of us walk into a mid-year review and we're hoping our boss tells us how we're doing.

00:00:51
Well, today I'm going to show you how to evaluate yourself first, so when you walk into that performance review with your boss, you're full of confidence, clarity, and able to stay your Grounded Self no matter what he says or she says.

00:00:51
So let's dig in.

00:00:51
Well, I know for so many of my clients, it is mid-year review season, and a lot of people just hope that maybe their boss will forget about it, or it'll just go away, or it'll be easy peasy and they'll not say anything at all.

00:01:14
So if you're anything like a lot of the women that I coach, you may already be feeling a lot of tension in your body when you hear those words: “It's mid-year review time,” when you have to check in, when you have to figure out, like, when I put those goals in at the beginning of the year, did they change?

00:01:32
Well, what makes the tension show up in our mind when we hear it's mid-year review time? I think for many of us, it's this fear of, “Did I do enough? Did I work on the right things? Am I behind? What if my boss isn't thinking I'm doing well? What if he's not happy with my work?”

00:01:55
What if they bring up something negative? That definitely throws us into a lot of fear. What if I've been working incredibly hard, but in their mind, I've worked on the wrong things, that my priorities are off?

00:01:55
Here's the irony: the purpose of a mid-year review isn't actually to judge you. I know many of you might disagree with me. It's to realign you, to have a check-in. It's a really cool chance to have that type of conversation with your boss.

00:02:31
Because what happens every year in most of your worlds is you set goals, and then things change because the world changes and priorities change, and not many of us actually go back immediately and modify our goals and have that conversation referenced back to the January goals we set.

00:02:31
Why? Because we're busy. And I think more and more, it's just expected these things change.

00:02:31
I want to pose to you today that we approach mid-year reviews backward.

00:02:57
A lot of us go into that meeting room, and we're waiting for our boss to tell us what's important, what's going well, what needs improvement, and all what they see about our work. And we're putting all of our confidence into their hands.

00:03:15
They really don't see what we do every day. They don't see the results. They don't see the interactions unless they're following you around. And we have a lot of fear about what they are going to think of me, what they interpreted about my actions up to this point in the year.

00:03:15
And that creates a lot of anxiety. And now we're kind of on the defensive. We're worried about criticism instead of having our own performance review with ourself first.

00:03:41
So what if you walked into that room and you were already so clear on what success looks like for you this year, how you're progressing toward that definition of success, what is getting in the way, and how you're already tackling all those barriers?

00:03:41
This creates a completely different conversation, I promise.

00:04:02
Let me walk you through my Power Question Framework because this applies wholeheartedly to our mid-year reviews.

00:04:02
I want you to sit at your desk. Maybe you like the whiteboard. I personally love the whiteboard. I don't know if it's the markers or the board or what, but do what makes sense for you, and we're going to go into the future.

00:04:20
I want you to imagine that it's the end of this year and you nailed it. This has been your most amazing year yet. I don't care what group or job or whatever you're in. I want you to think about in this job, how did you nail this position? All the things ahead of you. And ask yourself, “What happened? What did I do?”

00:04:40
Not generically, like, “I delivered the project,” but what does that mean? What does success actually look like for you at the end of the year if you nailed it?

00:04:40
Here are some examples. Say you delivered key projects on time and you know exactly what those milestones are. Maybe it's that you built strong stakeholder relationships. Maybe it's you improved team communication or you increased your client retention. Maybe you grew the revenue or you reduced turnover.

00:05:04
Get really concrete here. And it's still going to probably be a little bit vague until this next question.

00:05:04
So next, I want you to answer, “How would I know I'm progressing toward that success right now?” Like, what are the measurable indicators?

00:05:36
So instead of, “I want stronger stakeholder relationships,” ask, “How would I know I'm improving the relationships?” Maybe you would know this because it's a topic of conversation in your monthly check-ins, you have fewer escalations with stakeholders, maybe you get faster approvals than normal on any of your invoices, or maybe there's positive stakeholder feedback that you're getting.

00:05:36
So another example would be instead of, “I want to deliver projects successfully,” which is what many of our goals look like, let's be honest, maybe instead it's, “I achieved each of these three milestones. I identified these risks early. The budget was maintained, and I know this because of our SAP system,” or whatever you guys use is actually tracking.

00:06:04
Maybe you met the delivery dates, and that is what it means to deliver the project milestone successfully.

00:06:04
So then I want you to ask, “What makes getting to success hard?”

00:06:04
And this is where the magic happens because this is where most people skip past this part.

00:06:25
So in the first example about project delivery, maybe your success metric is delivering a major project by October, but a third-party vendor keeps missing the deadline so far. Now you can see the obstacle clearly. So the issue isn't, “Oh no, I'm doing a bad job leading them.” It's, “We have an external dependency creating a schedule risk.”

00:06:51
And those are very different things. Then you can figure out what can we do contractually to help drive them toward aligning on the schedule? What else could we do in terms of other suppliers? I don't know, it's up for you guys to solve, but I want you to start asking these questions so that you can solve the actual problem instead of blaming, complaining, staying super general, which isn't helpful.

00:07:19
So the second example, when it came to stakeholder relationships: if your goal is to have stronger partnerships across the different departments, but you're finding it difficult because everybody's overloaded, maybe meetings keep getting canceled or people aren't responding.

00:07:19
So the obstacle isn't, “I'm bad at relationships,” or, “They're difficult.” The obstacle is, “I need a better strategy for staying connected in this busy environment where they're tied up in other meetings.” Maybe there are existing meetings where you can get put on the agenda as a check-in.

00:07:47
It's a totally different conversation, one where you're blaming the others or yourself, or you're actually taking accountability and saying, “What can we do about this? Let's solve it.”

00:07:47
When every obstacle becomes your strategy, that's where the magic happens.

00:07:47
Say there's a third example, and your goal of success is to develop your team, and you want to build stronger leaders beneath you. But every time you delegate something, you end up taking it back.

00:08:08
Well, why? Because it feels better. Maybe it's just easier. You're worried about the quality. We tell ourselves all these things. Now you can identify the real obstacle. It's not your team's capability. It's your relationship with delegation and the worry of letting them be in control of the outcome.

00:08:27
What can you do to help them along the way? Maybe if they really aren't competent, maybe if they don't understand how it's supposed to work, you can walk them through that, but not from the place of doing everything and controlling them all.

00:08:27
Again, this is something you can actually work on.

00:08:27
So here's the shift I want everyone to make. And this is why I love this process so much.

00:08:47
Confidence doesn't come from hearing your boss say, “Great job.” Confidence comes from the clarity with which you walk into that room.

00:08:47
When you walk in that room and you know what success looks like for you in this job, you know how you're measuring it, how you're progressing toward success, and you also know what's helping, what's making it tough, and you have those clear actions about how you're going to get to success.

00:09:08
Now, when you walk into your review, you're not waiting for your boss to tell you who you are or how you're doing. You're having a conversation about the actual work you're working on and how you're progressing toward the results that you want.

00:09:35
There's also an opportunity here for you to say, “Here's how I need your support or your help.” Or you can also spend the opportunity and check in with them and say, “What else am I missing? What else do you see as making this tough? How are you seeing this progressing?”

00:09:35
So before your mid-year review, don't start with your boss and wait on them to tell you all the things. I want you to start and give yourself your mid-year review first.

00:09:55
Define success, determine how you're going to know you're progressing, and then what is making getting to success difficult.

00:09:55
You're six months in, so at this point you should be able to say, “Man, these things have really been tough.”

00:09:55
Then we're going to walk into that mid-year review and we're going to compare notes. “Here's how I see all the things. How do you see all the things?”

00:10:16
And you're in a place to ask them great questions and have a deeper, richer conversation than just waiting to hear, “You're doing a good job. Keep it up.”

00:10:16
Which is exactly what we're going to talk about next week, because I know many people want feedback, but we find ourselves stuck when they just said, “I was doing a great job,” and that's not even really helpful.

00:10:39
So that gets very frustrating for all of us. You're not alone. “You're doing great” is not helpful feedback. So if you're the boss giving that, let's rethink this. I'm going to tell you more next week.

00:10:39
You can walk into this mid-year review being confident and grounded and really finding who you want to be in these moments.

00:10:39
With that, I wish you all an amazing week, and I'll see you guys next time.