Performance Reviews: How to Own Them (Without Letting Them Own You)
from the founder of careercoaching.ie
For many people, this time of year brings the annual or bi-annual performance review and with it, a mix of nerves, frustration, and pressure.
That reaction makes sense.
Performance reviews aren’t just abstract exercises. They’re often tied to pay, progression, and a sense of security, particularly now when the cost of living is high and many people are already feeling stretched. It’s not unreasonable to care deeply about how this process goes.
If performance reviews feel emotive for you, you’re not overreacting.
You’re responding to something that has real consequences.
What Shifted Things for Me
I spent almost 12 years at Meta and went through 22 performance review cycles first as an individual contributor, and later as a manager.
Early on, I dreaded them.
Writing about other people’s work was fine. Writing about my own felt awkward and unnatural. I struggled to articulate what I’d contributed and often felt like I needed a creative writing degree just to get through the self-review.
What eventually changed wasn’t the system, it was how I approached it.
I realised my performance review was mine.
And if I didn’t take ownership of it, no one else would.
From Pressure to Perspective
One simple reframe helped:
No one will care about your career more than you do.
That isn’t a criticism of managers, it’s just a reality of how organisations work.
Performance reviews tend to go better when:
there are no surprises
your manager isn’t hearing about your impact for the first time
the case for your contribution is already clear
Seen this way, the review itself isn’t where decisions are made.
It’s where earlier conversations are formalised.
That shift alone reduced a lot of the emotional weight for me.
Using Reviews as Information (Not a Verdict)
For a long time, I experienced reviews as something to be judged.
What helped was treating them instead as a source of information:
What work am I proud of and why?
Where did I have the most impact?
What does this tell me about what motivates me and how I like to work?
Those questions didn’t just improve how I approached reviews they helped me make better decisions about where to focus my energy.
At one point, working through the Bold Vision exercise from the Fast Forward Group gave me language for what I wanted more of in my career. That clarity fed directly into some very practical outcomes over time: moving to work in London, contributing to award-winning campaigns and stepping into team development and leadership roles.
It wasn’t about having a perfect plan, it was about understanding direction well enough to make intentional choices.
Keeping the Review Itself Practical
As a manager, the most effective performance reviews I received were clear and simple.
They answered three questions:
What did you do? (projects, targets, responsibilities)
How did you do it? (collaboration, influence, decision-making)
What was the impact? (results, outcomes, learning)
This clarity coupled with quality peer feedback made advocacy easier and feedback more useful when promotion or pay outcomes weren’t what someone hoped for.
More detail didn’t help.
Better signal did.
Taking a Longer View
The people who got the most value from performance reviews weren’t always the ones with rigid plans.
They didn’t necessarily know exactly where they wanted to be in five years. But they had a reasonable understanding of:
what they were good at
what they wanted more (or less) of
what kind of experience they were trying to build
They used the review as a checkpoint not a verdict on their worth.
Closing
Performance reviews aren’t perfect and they’re rarely neutral.
But when you approach them as something you can work with rather than something done to you, they become more useful, and a little less personal.
Not a judgment of your value.
Just one data point in a longer career.