The Three Questions Nobody Asks in a Performance Review

We are somehow already approaching mid-year review season. Love it or dread it, it seems to arrive earlier each year. 

Most professionals sit through some version of the same conversation. What did you achieve? Where can you improve? How will you achieve your goals for the rest of the year? 

Useful questions, in theory. But there are three questions that never make it into that room, and they are the ones that would actually tell you something worth knowing.

1. Did this give you energy or take it? 

Not your output. Not your results. What actually happened to you while you produced them.

You can hit every target and feel hollow. You can have a messy, inconclusive week and feel unexpectedly alive. Most performance systems ignore this completely. But you still feel the effect of it either way. 

The question worth asking at the end of any week is not only did I do enough, but am I more energised or more depleted than when I started?

Try this: think about the last few months. Write down one thing that consistently left you flat, and one thing that left you feeling more like yourself. You do not have to act on it yet. Just notice the ratio.

2. Did the work actually fit?

Not whether you hit your targets. Whether the version of you that showed up every day was recognisably you.

Fit is the sense that what you are doing is consistent with what you value, what you are building, and who you actually are. When it is there, even hard work feels sustainable.  When it is not, even easy work feels oddly heavy.

Most people have never been asked this question formally. Many have never asked it of themselves.

Try this: think about a moment in the last few months where you felt most like yourself at work. What were you doing? Who were you with? What does that tell you about what fit actually looks like for you?

3. How much of it did you actually choose?

This is the simplest of the three, and probably the most important.

Look at your average week. How much of what fills it did you consciously choose?

Not inherited from a previous version of your role, not assumed because it was always done that way, not kept on the calendar because nobody ever questioned it. Actually chosen.

Most people, when they look honestly, find the list is shorter than expected. Not because they have no agency, but because obligation has a way of colonising the calendar so gradually you stop noticing it has happened.

Try this: pick one thing in your week that you have never consciously chosen but have always done. Ask yourself honestly: is this still necessary, or is it just familiar? You do not have to remove it. Just decide.

These are not the questions your company will ask you. They are the ones worth asking yourself, regularly, before someone else decides what your year was worth.

I explore this idea much more deeply in Chapter 5 of The Unwritten Job Description, which was just released. You can check it here

Would love to know what you think,

Serena