Get evidence i.e. Being your own advocate

[Scougar]

This is not about "look at me, look how good I did!", this is some feedback on an approach I used prior to half yearly and yearly reviews that ended up in a very good result in a corporate position. (I.e. playing the game).

#1: Get email feedback on any tough projects you were involved with and from those people you worked closely/actively with. Even from other teams. (Don't be pushy about it though).

#2: Give email feedback to those people in advance. I sent positive feedback to six people from various teams for example.

They and I were then able to attach emails prior to review time as ONE source of evidence in those reviews.

This approach gained me 3 to 4 times my usual bonus and pay raise.

Obviously I worked hard during the year as well and did weekends at times, but BE YOUR OWN ADVOCATE.

Good luck. Remember your worth.

 

[Scougar]

This was baked into the standard review process where I used to work, you would nominate about half a dozen people to provide feedback on yourself from a range of different interactions (direct reports, peers, other teams, business/IT reps etc). You could then be asked to give feedback on others or pro-actively provide feedback on others without being asked. This could be directly fed into the HR system rather than needing to attach emails, although I usually gave that option when gathering feedback on my team for simplicity.

I guess what you are suggesting is to provide positive non-anonymous feedback to the people you are going to request feedback from in order to influence their likely feedback on yourself (subconscious back-scratching).

Something I had to learn since being over on this side of the pond is... the work itself is not enough. You need to be making connections through your work, and market yourself. Money talks, play the game. Corp doesn't care about you.

As for the back scratching, I only provided feedback to people that I thought did a good job in the first place. If there is 'negative' feedback, I give that to them personally.

Additionally, I took positive comments from IM's (where appropriate) as evidence. A technical director making reference that I would be a great candidate for 'X' position based on my work for example.

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Where does this come from? I had failed in the previous year to supply evidence, and my manager at the time was clearly being vindictive against the team for an extremely tough project that I am guessing they got some grief over. We worked our butts off, then got penalized for it at review time, even though we delivered. I vowed to never let that happen again, and this is the result.