Mardi Humphreys

Don’t Dread It. Go and Get It!

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Shhhhhh. Do you hear that? It’s the collective groan of employees working on self assessments for annual performance reviews. If wracking your brain for strengths, weaknesses, and accomplishments has you searching for the migraine tablets, consider this: You can turn your annual performance review into an opportunity to showcase your mad skills. Last year, I decided to do just that and received a promotion for my trouble 🙂 Here is a formula that worked for me:

Accentuate the Positive
As Stuart Smalley (Saturday Night Live) says, “You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and doggone it, people like you.” A performance review is the time to remind your manager why he/she likes you. Take this opportunity to blow your own horn particularly if you don’t like to. What were your biggest accomplishments during the past year? Make a list. When you see your contributions in writing, your confidence grows. After listing all you can think of, set the task aside for an hour or so. When you come back to it add any others that came to mind while you were working on something else. (Funny how that happens. You take your mind off a task and when you return to it fresh, you have another idea. It usually comes to me during a time I can’t go write it down, like in the shower.) Pare the list down to your top three for your final draft. BTW, if you don’t have a running list of accomplishments since your last performance review, start one for next year. Right. Now. If you don’t remember the major thing you accomplished six months ago, your manager won’t either.

Eliminate the Negative
A performance review allows you a peek inside your supervisor’s head. Most bosses won’t come right out and tell you what they think of your work – especially if your work doesn’t please them – but an annual review forces communication. This usually involves identifying your weaknesses. Do NOT say you don’t have any. We all do and you’ll be better off identifying them yourself instead of forcing your manager to batter your ego by listing perceived defects. It’s also very tempting to cheat on this one. IE: “My biggest weakness is that I work too hard.” (Can you hear my eyes rolling?) Instead, how about presenting your weakness followed by how you are addressing it? IE: “I’m having trouble formatting the charts in the Activity Reports so I’ve signed up for an online Excel course.” This acknowledges you see an area in which you need to improve and you already have a plan to do so. Stick to just one or two things you’re going to improve by next year’s performance review. No need to expose ALL your flaws.

Latch on to the Affirmative
You’ll probably also be asked to comment on your strengths. Remember the accomplishment list you made? Revisit the things you did not include in your top three. Can you use some of those for your strengths? For example, if “I caught a typo on an invoice saving the department $1000 four months ago,” did not make your top three accomplishments, you could repurpose that accomplishment into a strength: I have excellent proofreading skills (IE: In April I saved my department $1000 when I found a typo while proofreading an invoice). Try to come up with examples of when you saved the company money, made the operation more efficient, and/or made your team stronger.

Don’t Mess with Mr. In-Between
Even if your company says your performance review is not tied to a raise, act like it is. It’s motivation. Establish a baseline against which you want your manager to judge your work over the next year. Use this meeting to pick your manager’s brain. Bob King, a former Senior Vice President of CLEAResult Consulting suggests, “Embrace this process as an opportunity to make sure that your perspective is aligned with your supervisor, and should it turn out not to be, engage your supervisor in a positive fashion to explore where perspectives diverged.” If you don’t have a habit of checking in with your boss every couple of months to ask him/her how you’re doing, put it on your calendar. A performance review should not be the first conversation the two of you have regarding the quality of your work and it’s up to you to initiate that feedback. In your review, set goals that receive your manager’s blessing. Over the next year, keep notes on what you’re doing to reach those goals (online courses, certifications, earned CEU’s) and check in periodically before your next performance review to inform your boss of the progress you’re making. Now is a good time to suggest ways you want to grow. Ways for which perhaps your company will reimburse you (associations you want to join, classes you want to take, conferences/seminars you want to go to). If you approach this review as a “get to” instead of a “got to,” you could come out of it in a much better position than you entered it.

Shout out to Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer for their song “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive.” Now I’m stuck with an earworm.

Is It Worth Your T.E.A.M.?

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I think after you graduate high school, life speeds up. Adulting necessitates lots of decision making. Some decisions can be life-changing. (“Should I REALLY have sex without a condom?”) Other decisions, not so much. (“Should I REALLY eat that third scoop of peanut butter cup ice cream?”) I’m often asked: “How do you know you’re making a wise choice?” My answer: “If it’s worth my T.E.A.M., then I do it. If it’s not worth my T.E.A.M., then I don’t.” For me, T.E.A.M. stands for Time, Energy, Attention, and Money. These elements are currency. They are valuable. They cost as much as you’re willing to pay, so they’re very individualized. The next time you make an important decision, first ask yourself: Is it worth my T.E.A.M.?

Time – There are 168 hours in a week. If you’re not intentional in spending them, they just fly away. Do you ever get to Friday afternoon and wonder where all your week went? Keep a log for a week. Write down everything you do and how long it takes. For a week. Don’t have time to stop and write everything down? Dictate it into your phone. When you get to next Friday afternoon, see what your big time wasters are. Because if you’re thinking of adding something to your schedule, how else are you going to know if it will even fit?

Energy – You only have so much. You can do things to increase it, like exercise, but it runs out and must be recharged. Sometimes it’s a curse to have a ton of energy because you deceive yourself into thinking you can push your body past its limits. If your plate is full and you add something, something that is already on the plate will get pushed off. Better for your brain to choose what gets pushed off the plate than your body deciding for you. If you’re thinking about taking on something that will spend a lot of energy, will the commitment fire you up or drain your battery?

Attention – Given the amount of screens screaming for your attention it’s easy to waste a ton of time not accomplishing anything. There’s a reason it’s called “paying” attention. It costs you something. Make sure whatever (or whomever) is asking for your attention is valuable. Some questions to ask yourself before taking on a project that will demand a great deal of your attention are: Does it have lasting benefits? Can you learn from it? Is it an investment in a relationship? Are you building someone up?

Money – You’re on a budget (or should be!). You only have so much cash at your disposal. You have bills to pay, things for which to save, and charities to support. How do you decide if something is worth spending your hard earned wages on? Education is worth spending money on. Retirement is worth spending money on. Premium cable? Not in my opinion. Now, having said that: Do you eat out a lot? Travel? Go to movies? Game? If not, and cable is all you do, then maybe it IS a good investment. For you. Me? I’d rather read a book from the public library.

The bottom line is: what you spend your T.E.A.M on is an intensely personal decision. Only you can decide if the item or service or person is worth whatever you have to sacrifice to obtain it. Do you have a decision making system?

It Ain’t Rocket Surgery

Back in 2011, my husband, daughter, and I moved from Georgia back to our native Ohio because my husband received a job offer. When the time came for my husband to start his new job, our house in Georgia was still on the market. We could not afford two mortgages, so my grandmother graciously allowed us to bunk with her for a bit. One night a line of thunder storms came through. My husband’s car was parked in front of Grammy’s house under three dying trees. Grammy made us all go to the basement to wait out the storm. It’s a finished basement. It’s very nice. In fact, it’s where my husband and I stayed. Well, one of those three trees lost a huge limb which fell on my husband’s car. It smashed the windshield, then decided to roll over the top of the car and bust the rear window too. It was like the tree broke both windows on purpose! After a a day of calling our insurance company and Grammy’s insurance company and cleaning up the mess, we finally settled on the car-glass-replacement-company-that-comes-to-you to fix his car. My husband is very hands on so when the tech arrived, he went to greet him and kinda hover while he did his job. My husband was impressed with this tech’s skill, speed, and efficiency and he told him so. “It must’ve taken you a long time to learn how to do this,” said my husband. “It ain’t rocket surgery,” replied the tech. Now whether he meant “It ain’t rocket science,” or “It ain’t brain surgery,” or whether he meant exactly what he said, we’ll never know because to keep from cracking up my husband stopped asking questions. After the tech left, he couldn’t wait to tell my daughter and me the story. It was a bright spot in a stressful time in our lives, and to this day when one of us is making a mountain out of a molehill we say to that person, “It ain’t rocket surgery.” I believe God allows situations in our lives so we will share them with others and form community. I’m here not just to tell you my stories, but also to read about yours. So please leave a comment or shoot me an email describing a time in your life when you made a situation harder than it had to be. We’re on life’s journey together and most of the time, it ain’t rocket surgery.