These 20 questions cover five key areas that are critical to your accurately evaluating how well you’re doing at work. Your answers (or score) predict whether you’re likely to be promoted, fired or kept simmering in the same spot for years to come.
Score each question on a scale of 1-10 (10 = AWESOME). Add up your total score in each category. If you are totally awesome, you’ll have a total of 200 points. If you score below 30 points in any category, it’s time to take remedial action.
Job mastery
How well do I?
1. Exhibit expertise of the particular knowledge and skills that make me a uniquely valuable employee
2. Continue to get educated to update my knowledge and skills for my position and the positions I desire to hold in the future
3. Understand the metrics by which I am evaluated as well as those that my department is judged, and work to excel at those measured behaviors
4. Manage my tasks and actions to contribute to the performance outcomes set for my department and company
Communication with my boss
How well do I?
5. Understand and articulate my boss’ top priorities and reasons for them, and approach my work in that manner
6. Know which is of greater consequence to my superior: people, projects or principles
7. Appreciate my boss’ sense of balancing the need to a) gather information and b) take action
8. Show that I understand and support my superiors’ professional aspirations
Relating to others and gaining visibility
How well do I?
9. Seek to create significant, lasting connections with everyone in my company
10. Communicate using all opportunities to strengthen my ties throughout the organization
11. Manage my intentions and actions to appropriately compete and collaborate with my peers
12. Project my desire to be a resource to others as well as a willingness to be assisted by them
Cultural sensibility, belief and belonging
How well do I?
13. Keep a clear picture of the formal and informal reporting lines in my company
14. Like my company’s overall approach to business, people and the marketplace
15. Believe that I can contribute to the larger goals and vision of my organization
16. See that opportunities exist for me to grow and gain greater responsibility and authority in my company
Good judgment and resourcefulness
How well do I?
17. Imagine I would be able to step up and fill in for my boss or another superior, if needed
18. Seek opportunities to be increasingly effective and efficient with the tools, workspace and funds allocated to me
19. Build relationships outside of the company that can be leveraged for its benefit
20. Relate to people who have the capacity to mentor me and widen my scope of influence
There’s a wealth of free and low-cost resources to get you back on track. Let me know if there are any areas you’d like to drill down on, and I’ll be happy to send you a list to kick-start your career. Email: Nance@NanceRosen.com
Author:
Nance Rosen is the author of Speak Up! & Succeed. She speaks to business audiences around the world and is a resource for press, including print, broadcast and online journalists and bloggers covering social media and careers. Read more at NanceRosenBlog. Twitter name: nancerosen
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I really like this. So often performance reviews are anodyne affairs thrust upon you by your boss. Doing this kind of internal review of your performance on a regular basis would be much more effective.
The questions are very well done and go deeper than most…how about offering them as a mind map?
Even better, you could offer some “if-then” resources for each of the questions.
Roger
Adi and Roger – This is exactly why we all need each other to raise the boat. Encouragement and expansion – you both give welcome feed-in. Maybe we could run a thread where we posit each question as a deficit, and the world of personal branders could add in thoughts and solutions to build on.
This is a really excellent list of questions for anyone operating in an organizational structure. If the answer to any of them is no, then moving toward the solutions is as important as the questions. For many of these questions, the solution is to seek more help, advise, and support from within and beyond the organization. There is a role here for executive coaching and training to ensure engagement and success.
So, Nance:
What’s the next step?
Where do we start?
Roger
My web team is going to put up a site that we can use as a hub. Meantime, readers have been emailing me questions and I’m answering directly – which is a great way for them to get guidance quick- and for us to know what are the burning issues. More on this to come!
Thanks for the update…sounds like a win/win near-term action plan. Hope others will continue to submit questions.
Jay – thanks for joining our dialogue on this! I hope you find my next blog’s questions equally important when it comes to coaching executives and others. Here’s a preview: it’s about hostility! Looking forward to hearing more from your perspective and expertise.