This is great advice, Jos! My version of your “don’t state, explain” is “show, don’t tell” :-)
One interesting thing about the review cycle that I just finished is that we had word limits on rating and promo packets: 600 words and 1000 words respectively. I have to say that writing packets was a lot more painful. I would start with a 2500 word self-review (+ feedback from many peers!) and would suffer for many hours to transform that into the 600 words (including quotes from peers).
While I truly hated to process of this text compression and had to remind myself that this is very much the job I am paid to do multiple times, I think the limit had a positive effect. The fluff was forced out: I had to think many times about each item I am including and what I am dropping to include this particular item. I had space to explain only a few major things. And anything that I stated had to link to a supporting doc/task/presentation/etc.
The best part about having limits was in reading packets! For the first time, I had enough time to at least read through packets being presented by other managers. While I didn’t understand all of the details, I could now ask questions (it is much harder to ask specific questions about things you have not read :-) ) and questions lead to a meaningful discussion.
The net of this, is that I started these evaluations hating the word limits, but came out appreciating them! There is talk about excluding quotes from the world limit in the future m, which I think will be a great change, as I had to make very painful cuts to include some great peer quotes. I think that word limit can help with clarity (at the cost of more work for managers).
This advice assumes that 1) there is a written promotion package process and 2) it gets evaluated by people other than one's direct manager. The situations where both are true are pretty rare: for example in many startups promotions either don't exist or are quite lightly evaluated. In many old-fashioned places (finance, media, etc...) the equivalent of a promo package is taking one's manager out for dinner, and similarly schmoozing other colleagues or upper management. It's only true in a select number of late-stage scaleups or public tech companies.
Fair comment. This article only applies to companies that at least try to have a more or less objective promotion process. That includes big tech, but also many scale ups that want to become like big tech. For instance my former employer, definitely not big tech, did something similar.
A refreshing down-to-earth Dutch reality check. Great write-up ;-)
Thank you!
This is great advice, Jos! My version of your “don’t state, explain” is “show, don’t tell” :-)
One interesting thing about the review cycle that I just finished is that we had word limits on rating and promo packets: 600 words and 1000 words respectively. I have to say that writing packets was a lot more painful. I would start with a 2500 word self-review (+ feedback from many peers!) and would suffer for many hours to transform that into the 600 words (including quotes from peers).
While I truly hated to process of this text compression and had to remind myself that this is very much the job I am paid to do multiple times, I think the limit had a positive effect. The fluff was forced out: I had to think many times about each item I am including and what I am dropping to include this particular item. I had space to explain only a few major things. And anything that I stated had to link to a supporting doc/task/presentation/etc.
The best part about having limits was in reading packets! For the first time, I had enough time to at least read through packets being presented by other managers. While I didn’t understand all of the details, I could now ask questions (it is much harder to ask specific questions about things you have not read :-) ) and questions lead to a meaningful discussion.
The net of this, is that I started these evaluations hating the word limits, but came out appreciating them! There is talk about excluding quotes from the world limit in the future m, which I think will be a great change, as I had to make very painful cuts to include some great peer quotes. I think that word limit can help with clarity (at the cost of more work for managers).
This advice assumes that 1) there is a written promotion package process and 2) it gets evaluated by people other than one's direct manager. The situations where both are true are pretty rare: for example in many startups promotions either don't exist or are quite lightly evaluated. In many old-fashioned places (finance, media, etc...) the equivalent of a promo package is taking one's manager out for dinner, and similarly schmoozing other colleagues or upper management. It's only true in a select number of late-stage scaleups or public tech companies.
Fair comment. This article only applies to companies that at least try to have a more or less objective promotion process. That includes big tech, but also many scale ups that want to become like big tech. For instance my former employer, definitely not big tech, did something similar.