Evaluating Your Own Performance

How Accurate Is Your View of Yourself?

Things were pretty normal at the office until the email came out from Human Resources: the performance management system was changing.

Most of the time these emails barely get read - but this one created an uproar.

For this next performance cycle, managers had new targets to meet company-wide: 70% of the staff would be getting an average rating (3 out of 5). Only 15% would be rated either above average (4) and exceptional (5) while the remaining 15% would be rated below average (2) and marginal (1).

Much of my team’s work stopped cold: fierce discussion about the new system raged on in meetings, in our group chats, and emails circulated - some with intense emotions attached to them.

"This is unfair," was a common theme amongst the discussions.

But was it unfair? I don’t want to get into the merits of why or why not this type of bell-curve performance management is valid - but let’s look at the individual. How do you honestly evaluate your own performance?

In the article "Everyone Thinks They Are Above Average," the author references a tendency called ‘Illusory Superiority.’

We "THINK" we are better than others around us - even when it is not true.

From the article:

"Since psychological studies first began, people have given themselves top marks for most positive traits. While most people do well at assessing others, they are wildly positive about their own abilities.

That's because we realize the external traits and circumstances that guide other people's actions, "but when it comes to us, we think it's all about our intention, our effort, our desire, our agency — we think we sort of float above all these kinds of constraints," said David Dunning, a Cornell University psychologist.

When we evaluate our own performance, we take in so many more factors than people that view our work externally. We know what our inner dialogue was (and continues to be) and we know if we legitimately worked hard to complete the work or not. We also take into consideration our own hurdles and how difficult it was to overcome them, for example, if you just had a new baby arrive in your family then you did all this work despite your lack of sleep. That might make you rate your actual performance higher than someone externally might view it.

But it isn’t just ‘Illusory Superiority’ causing us to skew our own view of performance. Overall self-awareness is a key to honest evaluations as well.

In November of 2017, I heard Dr. Tasha Eurich speak at a Denver TEDx event. She has studied self-awareness for several years, and had this to say,

"My team has found that 95% of people think they're self-aware, but the real number is closer to 10 to 15%. You know what this means, don't you? It means that on a good day - on a good day - 80% of us are lying to ourselves about whether we're lying to ourselves."

When I heard Dr. Eurich say this, it sobered me. I was guilty of both overestimating my performance and my self-awareness capability.

Since that day, I’ve done two things that have boosted my self-awareness.

1. I started a daily meditation practice

The meditation practice helps me to step outside of the day-to-day and to take an outsider’s view of myself and my interactions with others.

2. I began to ask everyone around me, "what could I do better next time?"

Asking others, "what could I do better?," when I completed a project, delivered a presentation, or conducted a meeting opened up and built trust with those around me that I was receptive to feedback and willing to make a change based on their input and I received more feedback than I was previously getting.

Neither of these things provides me with perfect self-awareness or completely reduce the illusion of superiority, but they help me understand a little more each time I do them.

Could they work for you? Let me know what you think - email me at [email protected].