It's focal time

It’s that time of the year! Our beloved self-assesment is here and it’s time to review yourself and your peers!

I think it’s an inevitable part of running a larger company. We had them at Intel, we have them at Atlassian too. I hate them with my guts.

But this year, I hate them less. Am I becoming a corporate drone?

In previous times I did some cocky one line reviews, but now I did almost an elaborate ;-)

What’s going on?

I think I approached it differently - first of all keeping a diary helped me to remember what actually happened in the past 12 months. Also I realized that because of our distributed nature (my manager is in Sydney and his manager too) it’s a rare chance for us to talk about my performance.

I also treated it as a way to highlight things that I learned and my plans for the future.

I wish I didn’t have to write it. I wish we had a great contact, I wish we talked about performance, plans and mistakes as part of the job. But that’s never the part of the job, we’re too busy to do that nowadays.

I always preach direct communication and honesty, I don’t have problem with that, but I imagine in a large company it may be really hard for some people to talk about their failures or point them out in the work of others.

If I’d run a company I’d not run reviews, they’re waste of time, instead I’d run a mentoring program in the spirit of trust and cooperation for your personal benefit. Because I’d want each employee to grow.