94 When Your Performance Rating Doesn’t Reflect Your Work And It Feels Political

Welcome to episode 94 of 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 Jolly, engineer, turn 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. If you're ready to drop the guilt and grow your courage, you're in the right place. I want you to think about the last time you got a performance rating that didn't match how hard you worked or the year you really thought you had Maybe you walked out of that review with your boss in the fall thinking, this year I did amazing. I finally get an exceeds. You had a list of outcomes that you went through. You led hard projects. You covered for people And then at the beginning of this year, you get your actual rating and your boss says, well, we've assessed you and you meet expectations, or maybe even lower. There's no feedback that went with the comment or the rating. There's some vagueness about like, well, you know, we just had to calibrate across the teams and it's very competitive, you know. And you leave that room furious. You're embarrassed. You're already crafting your speech which you wish you had given at the moment Well today we're gonna talk about that moment, that year where you feel like you didn't get the performance rating that you really deserved. I can remember having the best year ever where I influenced way beyond my circle did so many remarkable sh real game-changing things and I ended up getting a lower rating than I expected, than I really felt like I deserved. I had switched groups on the exact day that all of a sudden now you're counted in the new group, and the new group was like, we don't care about that. So I got the lower rating. We're gonna talk about why it's so infuriating when your performance rating doesn't reflect your actual work or what you believe you accomplished. We're gonna talk about why that reaction makes perfect sense. and why it might be based on a wrong assumption about what performance ratings really are about. My goal is not to gaslight you into loving a broken system. My goal is to help you stop tying your value, your potential and your future to a number that was never designed to tell you the whole truth about you. And your actual performance. But here's the thing, most of us grew up with this idea that performance rating equals how well I performed And it seems obvious, because literally it's the name, but that's not actually how most systems really work. Organizational psychologist Alan Coquette In the next generation of performance management, it points out that we ask performance ratings to do way too many jobs at the same time. They're used to allocate bonuses, justify promotions, and special job opportunities to prove goal compliance. Love that one, right? Sort talent into boxes for succession planning and sometimes to send signals about who's in favor and who isn't That's not a pure measurement tool. That's a Swiss Army knife. And the more purposes a rating serves, the less precisely it actually measures any one thing well. So your rating is not just how well did you do in your job, it's more like given the budget, the bell curve, the politics, who's where and what box we decided to put you in this year. That doesn't mean your performance doesn't matter. It does mean that the rating is a distorted reflection of your performance, not a clean mirror. It doesn't actually tell you most of the time about what your performance really looks like over the year. If we zoom in on what most ratings are truly built from, It's what your boss happens to see of your workday. It's what other people tell them about you, and it's their own beliefs and biases about what good looks like. Margaret Heffernon in Beyond Measure, this is one of my favorite books. So if you haven't read this, totally go grab it. She talks about how organizations obsess over what can be counted and then quietly ignore what can't be counted. And if your boss doesn't see your mentoring, your invisible emotional labor, the way you unstick other teams through your negotiation and collaboration skills, those things rarely show up on a form. And then we add the human brain on top of that, where we human brains love to confirm what we already believe. Psychologists call this confirmation bias, and it's once we've decided someone is a high potential, quote unquote, or difficult, We unconsciously collect evidence to support that story and we filter out everything that doesn't fit what we believe. Think about this in your personal life. Say if you have the belief about my spouse loves her job more than me then your brain will find every proof all day long that makes it mean that they love their job more than you. So when they're late for a meeting, they're excited about every story about work. And every night they fall asleep on the couch, you could make that all mean that they love their job more than you. We all only make it mean so often what we want to believe, the story we want to continue telling. It confirms our bias. The same thing happens at work. If your boss sees you as steady, reliable, and not super strategic, then their brain is gonna keep finding evidence for that. They might not even be aware that they're doing it. Most of us never are So your rating is not just here for the objective truth of your performance. It's more like, here's the story we currently tell about you based on limited data. biased human brains and inside a system that has way too many goals it's trying to use for the one system. And that's really sobering. It's actually really freeing as well Because if the system is flawed, a disappointing rating doesn't get to be a verdict about your worth or your capability in the office. Or your career. But there is the emotional side of all of this. And this is where so many of my clients live. When the rating is lower than expected and your brain goes something like this, after everything I did, this is what I get They clearly don't see me or appreciate me. I must not be as good as I thought, or I'll never get ahead here. It's just all politics and that's not me. Because we live in this ratings equals value or how we're appreciated the number feels like it's grading you, your talent, your potential, and your future. And of course you get angry. Of course you want to blame your boss, the calibration meeting, the other people, the one leader that maybe never liked you, or that one time in a meeting Things didn't go as planned. And listen, sometimes this really is bias or politics in the room. Sometimes there was a favorite. Sometimes your boss absolutely failed you by not giving you feedback all year. but just remember how rare it is to actually get good feedback. But here's the key shift I want to offer. A flawed rating system cannot actually measure your worth or what you're capable of. So don't hand your power over to it Dan Pink in Drive shows that when we tie everything to external rewards like ratings and bonuses and gold stars, we actually undermine the intrinsic motivation and creativity over time. We narrow our focus to what gets me the rating, and we forget the why the work matters to us in the first place. And this is the world we live in, right? So if you tie your identity to the rating, you're putting the most important part of your career, your belief in you, in the hands of a noisy, biased, overburdened process. a system that's flawed. And that's not the place we want to find ourselves. I want you to consider this wild idea. What if they can all be wrong about you? What if your ratings says more about your boss's blind spots, the politics of a calibration reading, the constraints of the bell curve, or the limits of a system? way more than it does about your potential. I remember once in a roundtable discussion about performance management how one of the guys who I really looked up to as a very technical expert had told the group that in his best year ever, he actually got the lowest rating. And in one of the worst years, he got his best rating ever. And he was like, I just wrote it off as it doesn't make any sense And I think so often we need to remind ourselves of that. That that is true. It doesn't indicate what you're capable of or the value you can bring to the table. So we need to separate out two questions. Number one, what is the story the others, your boss, the calibration team, is actually telling about you? What is actually true about who you are and what you're capable of? These are not the same question, and we confuse this very often. Alan Coquette argues that when an organization leans too hard on ratings, people become managers of impressions. Instead of learners and problem solvers, the whole thing becomes a game of optics. And I know you know this. I know you've seen this The person who talks a lot about their work but doesn't actually deliver much. The person who goes and gets beer or coffee with the people who are higher up. The quiet person that keeps running everything barely gets mentioned. If the loud one gets the hired rating, that tells you something about the system, not the inherent worth of the human, including you So when you get that disappointing rating, instead of asking what's wrong with me or I need to go quit, try asking, what might they not be seeing about me? What might they be getting wrong? Why would it make perfect sense that they miss this And what small part of this can be useful for my own growth for how I want to show up in the room? Even in a flawed system Feedback can be a signal. So let's get practical. What do you actually do with all of this? I want to give you four moves you can do. The first one is We need to decouple the rating from your worth. Before you do anything else, I want you to say to yourself out loud, if you can, the number is not my value. The number is not the final word on my potential or the value I brought to the table this year. You can feel disappointed without making it a character judgment. Both are allowed. You can acknowledge the rating and that it's unfair or incomplete and still believe deeply in your capability, the value you brought to the table, and your own growth. These can both be true at the same time. Move two. Ask for specifics even if your boss is extremely awkward in the response. So if your boss gave you almost zero feedback, you're not being needy by asking for more, you're doing your job. You're being courageous and brave So you could say, I'm still processing this reading and I'd love to understand it better so I can grow. Can you give me a few specific examples where you saw me falling short of expectations? Where Did this happen? I want to know more. And if they struggle, that actually is good information. Because they really may not have specifics which makes it support the fact that it's more of their perception about you than actually having solid evidence. You're gonna learn whether they have a clear picture of your work And you're gonna learn whether expectations were clearly defined ever, whether this is someone who can help you grow or someone you may eventually grow past. You're not going in to argue the number or complain or whine. You're going in to get data to learn more, to be curious Move three, build your own performance story. Margaret Hefferdon talks about how tiny habits like regular acknowledging and sharing the good work helps not only create a culture that's healthier that you want to work in, but it also helps you see and tell the story for yourself so others can see it. So don't wait for the next review cycle to tell your story. Keep a running list of all your evidence about, hey, these are the things that I did, the stakeholder feedback I got, the tough problems I solved. And then once a month or once a week or whenever your update is with your boss, say, here's what I'm working on and here's how it's going. Here's all the data that supports my successes, my growth And when big projects land, volunteer to present the summary or the lessons learned. Go above and beyond here. Not from a place of bragging or playing the politics. but making sure that there's actual information to help shape their perception when people talk about you. Ratings are all about perception. You're doing your part to make the evidence To make the perception more aligned with what you know you're bringing to the table. Move for. Decide what you think about you. This is one of the most important critical parts of all this. After you've processed the rating, after you've asked the questions, I want you to sit down with a blank sheet of paper and write. Here's what I'm working on this year and here's how I know I'll be making progress. This is where you list every single thing you're gonna do to grow all the things that you are driven to accomplish this year. And then throughout the year, look back and notice how you've grown, what risk have you taken, how have you been courageous, what skills have you built? What value have you contributed to the bottom line? Constantly check in with that and then go to your boss and share it. You can always truly, because you're an adult, look for a new role or even a new company. that more aligns. But don't do it from a place of bitterness and disgruntledness. But do it from a place of I see the value I bring to the table. And if they don't appreciate it, then that's just not a want match. There's no hard feelings, there's no disdain, nothing has had to gone very wrong. You can just do it from a place of, and I'm closing this chapter in my life and I'm taking on something new. So if you recently went through this performance rating discussion or the great reveal and you're upset about it Maybe you're in a toxic culture. Maybe you're really mad about your boss or just everything that's happening around you and it feels so unfair. Go back and remember that The system is not perfect. The system is not built to really rate performance. So if you want to find your way through all this, join my toxic culture workshop that's gonna identify how you can stay strong no matter what is happening around you, even the low ratings. Go to lizjolly. com forward slash toxic and sign up. With that, I wish you all an amazing week and I'll see everybody next time.