Performance Review: Human Edition
How to nail your review when HR’s not watching.
Smiling face and loving eyes, but you keep on telling me all those lies, AC/DC sings. The official soundtrack of mid-year reviews where everyone’s grinning, feedback is glowing, and the only thing transparent is your confusion.
July. You’re mentally on vacation, but HR has other plans: the mid-year review. The corporate equivalent of being called to the principal’s office, but with more acronyms and performance anxiety. Suddenly, your summer survival strategy is just hoping they don’t mention areas for improvement before you do.
Your meeting is scheduled for 2:30 p.m. — the international time for difficult conversations. You join the call one minute early like a coward. Your manager joins four minutes late, slightly out of breath, armed with a slide titled Guiding Conversation Starters, and looking as though she skimmed your self-review during the elevator ride.
How do you think the first half of the year went? This is not curiosity — it’s theater. You summon your best LinkedIn voice: Lots of growth opportunities. Learned to embrace new challenges. The words dangle in the air, about as convincing as a corporate motivational poster. You nod sagely, your manager nods back — two actors, one tired script, nobody buying it.
If I had one piece of feedback, it’d be to increase your accountability and transparency, she says. Apparently, owning your mistakes isn’t enough — you’re now expected to livestream them. As for transparency, you’re already so see-through that small children bump into you in hallways.
The office review? It’s a corporate talent show, and you are background scenery. So maybe it’s time to get a starring monologue in your self-review. The best roles go to those who actually write their own scripts — and deliver them off-camera.
Every so often, ask yourself if you’re living up to the values you actually care about or at least inching closer. No need to hit relentless synergy levels yet. But if your personal values poster is just gathering dust, maybe it’s time for a little rewrite.
Don’t wait for a calendar invite to check in with yourself. Self-reviews aren’t just for when things go wrong — they’re for any moment you realize you could have done better, made someone’s day easier, or even surprised yourself for the right reasons. It’s called continuous improvement when HR says it, but you can call it being a better human.
And maybe no one claps at the end of your self-reflection. But at least you don’t have to update the slide deck.
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