# Performance Review Tips: What to Do Before, During, and After Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-review-tips/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-review-tips.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving working with your manager at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Practical performance review tips in order: work out the criteria, rebuild the year, write claims that survive calibration, decide your ask, and follow up. ## Key facts - Title: Performance Review Tips: What to Do Before, During, and After - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Communication - Primary keyword: performance review tips - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-review-tips/ ## What this page covers - Practical performance review tips in order: work out the criteria, rebuild the year, write claims that survive calibration, decide your ask, and follow up. - Practical guidance for performance review tips - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation You have a review on the calendar and a year of work you can't fully remember. Most performance review tips come down to preparation: find out what you are being measured against, gather evidence from the whole review period rather than the last month, write two or three accomplishments with numbers attached, decide on one thing to ask for, and use the meeting to agree what happens next. The nervous part is usually not the preparation, though. It's the two things the checklists skip — how to talk about your own work without feeling like you're overselling it, and what to do when the rating isn't the one you expected. Both get easier when the preparation happens in the right order, and that order starts earlier than most people think. ## Performance review tips, in the order you'll need them Almost every step below depends on the one before it. Skip the first and you spend the rest of your preparation building a case against the wrong criteria. ### 1. Find out what you're actually being measured against Two to four weeks out, before you write anything, get clear on the yardstick: your job description, the goals agreed at the last review, whatever rating criteria your company uses, and how far back the review period reaches. Employee-facing guides from Slack and Qualtrics both point out that managers are supposed to make that scope explicit before you start writing — which tells you how often they don't. If nobody has said what period you're being assessed on or what "meets expectations" means in your role, ask. It's a one-line message, and it's the difference between assembling evidence and guessing. ### 2. Reconstruct the whole period, not the last six weeks The most repeated employee-side tip on the internet — Indeed, Lattice and Deel all lead with a version of it — is to keep a running record of accomplishments as they happen rather than reconstructing them at review time. The reason is recency bias. A year rebuilt in a single afternoon collapses into whatever happened since summer, and the March project that took you three months quietly disappears. Since you probably don't have that record yet, rebuild it the slow way: work backwards through your calendar, your sent mail, the project tracker, and any p[raise](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/ask-for-a-raise/) you saved. Then cut the pile down to the handful of items that map to the criteria from step 1. ### 3. Turn your work into claims your manager can repeat The guides converge on a specific target for the written self-assessment: two or three accomplishments with something measurable attached, plus one or two development goals. The number matters less as proof than as translation. Your rating is often discussed in a calibration meeting you don't attend, where your manager has to summarize you in a couple of sentences alongside everyone else. "I worked hard on the migration" cannot survive that trip. "I moved forty reports onto the new system, which cut the monthly close by two days" can. Say what you did rather than what the team achieved, and keep the claims to ones you could back up if asked. ### 4. Name your own development areas, and keep grievances out of the form Two mistakes dominate the advice, and they pull in opposite directions. The first is downplaying your accomplishments so you don't seem boastful — the trap Deel, Lattice and emPerform all name explicitly, and the one that catches people in their first few years hardest, because nobody has yet told them that self-advocacy is expected rather than merely tolerated. The second is using the form to vent. Several of the same sources warn against writing your frustrations with a manager, a colleague, or the company into a self-assessment, because it is a durable written record and it reads as disgruntled rather than as feedback. The fix isn't to swallow it: it's the medium. A written form is the wrong channel for a grievance; the live conversation is the right one. For the development goals themselves, pick one or two real gaps and pair each with the step you're already taking. Vagueness is what makes this section feel like a confession — "I could communicate better" invites a bad interpretation, while a specific gap with a plan attached reads as self-awareness. If you genuinely can't tell which of your gaps is worth naming, it's worth a few minutes to [pinpoint your real gaps](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) rather than picking whichever weakness sounds safest to admit. ### 5. Decide what you want before you walk in A review is one of the few moments each year when the organization is formally paying attention to your trajectory, and it is easy to spend all of it looking backwards. Ellevest's preparation guide makes the point bluntly: name the thing you want — the [promotion](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/how-to-ask-for-a-promotion/), the raise, the move toward managing — and ask what steps would need to happen to get there. Decide this beforehand. Arriving at an ambition in real time, while you're being evaluated, produces the sort of vague answer that's impossible to act on. One concrete ask and the question that opens it is enough. ### 6. Run the conversation: listen first, then make the case The strongest advice for the meeting itself, from both Bain and Gray and Ellevest, is to stay future-focused rather than defensive. Raise your own weak areas before your manager does. Explain circumstances without using them as an excuse. When [criticism lands](/knowledge/self-awareness/how-to-take-criticism/), hear all of it before you respond — [arguing a rating](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/bad-performance-review/) in the moment almost never moves it, whereas asking what would have produced a different one gives you something usable. It helps to know that your manager has been told to prepare too. Manager-facing guides from Quantum Workplace and ClearCompany push them to take a long view across the whole cycle rather than the most recent project, and to listen without assumptions. That's an opening: they are trying to remember the whole year, and you are the one person in the room who can hand them the evidence. ### 7. Turn the review into a plan, then start the next one Follow-up is the thinnest part of the advice online, and it's the step that decides whether any of this mattered. Within a day or two, write your own notes on what was said, confirm the agreed goals and next steps in writing, and put your specific ask on the agenda of your next one-on-one so it doesn't quietly expire. Then start the record you wished you had in step 2 — a running note of results, feedback and numbers as they happen. It takes a minute a week and it removes the hardest part of the next review entirely. ## The skills a good review quietly runs on Read back over those seven steps and most of them are not really about reviews. They're about a handful of behaviors that happen to become visible on review day. **Working with Your Manager** is the skill the whole event sits inside, and it describes the review almost exactly as the steps above do: prepare properly, influence your own evaluation, stay future-focused, and ask for what you want. The review is the audit of a relationship, not a test you sit. What makes it go well is mostly what happened in the months of one-on-ones before it — the results you made visible, the expectations you agreed. **Building Self-Awareness** is what makes step 4 honest and step 6 survivable. A review delivers two kinds of feedback at once, developmental and evaluative, and the way to use either is the same: understand it fully first, then add your own view, then reflect on it afterwards. It also covers the half most articles skip — asking for specific, future-focused advice instead of accepting "keep doing what you're doing," which leaves you with a rating and no direction. **Communication** is the delivery. Leading with your main point, being clear and direct, and keeping it brief is exactly how you present a year of work without inflating it. And the harder moments in a review are the tricky-conversation ones: disagreeing without it turning into an argument, receiving criticism without collapsing or defending, choosing the conversation over the written form when something needs trust rather than a record. None of these three is a trait you either have or don't — they're behaviors, and a gap in one just means it hasn't been learned yet. If you'd like to know which of them is your weak one before the next cycle comes around, the free Job Skills Test will tell you [which one to build first](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/). It reads **a wider set of twelve**, and a review leans on more of them than the three here. ## Where that leaves you Some of this may already describe how you work — you may keep a note of wins, or already know what you want to ask for this year. If so, that's the part worth building on. The rest is learnable in the ordinary way, by doing it once badly and once better, and none of it requires you to become a different person in the room. It also compounds: the further along you get, the more these formal conversations shape your pay, your projects, and what people say about you when you're not there. Reading a preparation guide before the meeting rather than filling in the form the night before is already the part most people skip. ## Check where your skills stand before the next review You know the sequence now. The only thing left is an honest read on which of the underlying skills come easily to you and which are doing the damage. The **free** Job Skills Test is a short self-assessment of your work skills that shows where you stand across all twelve, and points you at the one that would make the biggest difference — useful before a review, and more useful in the eleven months that decide it. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, takes 7 minutes, and you see your results right away.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Practical performance review tips in order: work out the criteria, rebuild the year, write claims that survive calibration, decide your ask, and follow up. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Working with Your Manager. It also relates to Building Self-Awareness, Communication. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-review-tips/ Preferred summary: "Practical performance review tips in order: work out the criteria, rebuild the year, write claims that survive calibration, decide your ask, and follow up." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.