3 Tips For Better Performance Reviews - Microsoft Connects

hi I'm Nick centino and I'm a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft in this video I wanted to talk to you about writing connects as a Microsoft employee now if you're not a Microsoft employee the concept of a connect is essentially just a performance review document it's something that you put together and you're able to fill out to talk about your accomplishments any setbacks and goals that you plan to set for the next period you fill this out and then you work with your manager to have a conversation on it get alignment and move forward so this might be something that you do do have at the company you work at but it might look a little bit different so in this video I will be talking about the Microsoft flavor of this but there's still could be some great takeaways for you if you're not at Microsoft I will be keeping this video ad free but if you're interested in seeing more of my content outside of YouTube then you can follow Dev leader on different social media channels okay to start things off the structure of a connect ends up having something at the beginning that talks about your reflection this is going to be a great opportunity for you to talk about your accomplishments so you'll talk about all the things that went well followed by an opportunity to talk about setbacks I've kind of introduced this in the beginning of the video beyond that you're able to set some goals and things that you want to be focused on for the upcoming period and then at the very end of that there's an opportunity to indicate some different things like conversation starters with your manager because you are going to be discussing this with your manager so that's the overall structure and I'm going to go through this piece by piece and talk about how I think it's beneficial for you to focus on this the first part when we're talking about accomplishments this is a great opportunity for you to talk about all of the impact that you've had now a lot of people struggle with this and one of the reasons they struggle with it is because they forget things right they're going to fill out their connect in the organization that I'm in connects are mandatory twice a year so if you're doing this every 6 months I mean you might be like I don't even know what I did two weeks ago right so coming up with this list of all the impact that you've had can be challenging for some people if you stay to the end of this video I will be talking about some other opportunities to help with this so if you need to be able to talk about all of the work you've done if you go the exact opposite direction something that can be a little bit challenging is instead of not having anything to write about you just document every single thing that you've done like every single pull request you've done everything that you've touched in the past period but this is also not necessarily effective it's better than having nothing to write about because now you have a bunch of stuff but it also makes it a little bit difficult to navigate and this is from the perspective of an engineering manager who is going through these types of things with their employees I even have to fill out a connect to go through with my own manager an effective way that you can try to transform this is to think about the different impact that you've had across these different work streams for example if you've done a handful of PLL requests on a particular feature and even if that feature is part of multiple features working towards a bigger project that is having some business impact talk about that business business impact try to group these things up into some type of impact that you can talk about for example you could say that if you were working on a team that was trying to improve performance you can talk about I improved performance you know from X to Y if you literally have numbers like this it's great you can say worked on improving performance and if it's helpful for you and trying to articulate just how you participated in doing this it's a great opportunity to then say okay like I did this feature this enhancement and talk about some of the details but going into extreme detail like talking about lines of code and stuff like that it's just too much it's kind of missing the point but like I said having more is probably better than having absolutely nothing my recommendation for you going through this section is to try thinking about the impact it's also worth mentioning that at Microsoft we have this concept of circles of impact and this is a Different Twist on the business impact you're having and talking about how this impact affects potentially other people so you could be having impact that contributes to the success of others you could have impact that's building on the work of others and you can also have impact that's directly correlated to the business so depending on which features and work streams you're working on you could call these things out as well overall this section when you're doing a reflection on your previous period and all of the work that you were doing it's a great opportunity to showcase just how much impact you had the next section when we're talking about setbacks I think this is something that some people get a little bit worried about and they'll say well I don't want to talk about something that went bad because now that's going to set me up to have some type of failure documented it's going to be held against me it's going to look bad but that's simply not the case when we talk about setbacks the idea behind this at least from the manager's perspective is that we know that everyone managers every single person we're human there's going to be setbacks there's going to be things that didn't go as planned and that's okay this is literally something that will happen to everyone we don't plan for all of our failures obviously if we could say like Snap our fingers and never fail again we would all do it but it's going to happen so instead of pretending like it's not happening it's good to acknowledge it and from there what you can do is build on what you learned from it this is really the takeaway it's not so much that you're able to say hey I failed at something it didn't go as planned end of story it's really all about what you learn from that so some something didn't go as planned you broke the build or you had a regression in production and you needed to have your change reverted these types of things happen what did you learn from that well you might have gone through the process and realized that you skipped over some of the automation tests or maybe they were broken or perhaps you were rolling out your change and you went a little bit too fast you missed some scope of capacity that you should have been checking your change on maybe you had signals that you weren't monitoring whatever it happened to be what did you learn from the mistake that was made this part of the connect is such an awesome opportunity to talk about growth so instead of thinking oh no I have to write about a failure this is going to look bad flip it on its head think about this is an awesome opportunity for me to talk about the things that I've learned and how I plan to grow from them the next section of the connect that I'll be talking about is this opportunity to talk about goals or core priorities for the upcoming period what I highly recommend to people to is to have conversations with your manager leading up to this right you should hopefully have something in mind about the areas that you should be focused on if you are a Microsoft employee and for me I work with an Office 365 or it's called substrate as well if you're working in Office 365 M365 we have something called the talent guide and it's basically just a rubric it's a formalized way that we can talk about across all the different roles and levels what the expectations are if you haven't had a conversation with your manager about this it's a great opportunity to bring it up so if you've been doing this leading up to your connect period and time for you to go write your connect you should have some idea about the areas that you need to focus on in terms of career growth from there what you can try to do is think about the different things in terms of projects that you know are coming up or just things that you want to focus on for yourself and write about those this means that you're going to be demonstrating to your manager that you have awareness about the areas that you should be growing into so you can do this in a couple of different ways and I've seen people do it Project based because they have some visibility into what's up and coming they have some idea about the work streams are going to be working on in the upcoming period and they will talk about the different projects and again this is a great opportunity to add in how that project is going to help in your own growth as well relating this back to business impact and opportunities is also a great choice the other way that I've seen people do this is instead of focusing on particular projects they instead just focus on General self-development this can also be a great thing to do I have employees over the past four years that have done both of these types of things I've seen people mix and match them I personally don't have a strong preference I think whatever is going to help you as an individual articulate how you want to focus on your growth I think that's important for me as a manager as I'm replying to my employees comments on their connects if I've noticed that they've only talked about one side of this and not the other I'll make sure to include in my comments some of the other perspective so for example if I have employees that are just talking about projects I will also make sure that when I'm responding I will talk about personal development things again that come from that Talent guide those other areas where we can say hey these are things you need to improve on in terms of collaboration or writing design documents things like that if the employee has done the opposite they've only talked about those those types of things then I will try to put in front of them potential projects that they could be working on that will also help align with that in my response and through our conversation I try to make sure that both things are covered if you're finding that your manager is not doing this this just might be something for you to think about in your conversation so maybe plan to be able to include both of these things so you can ensure both are covered these are the three major areas of the connect but I had two more bonus things that I wanted to include because I think they're super important for doing performance documents or connects it's really good opportunity for this the first one that I want to talk about is a Microsoft specific thing but you might have something again similar at the company you work at and that's called perspectives perspectives are a tool that we have at Microsoft to be able to request feedback from your peers and it's a great opportunity especially if you're working cross teams and you want to make sure that some of your impact and collaboration is documented you can send a perspective to someone else on a different team that you've been working on it could also just be one of your peers your colleagues on your immediate team you can send them a perspective and you can add a custom message like hey I know we collaborated on this project do you have any feedback for me this feedback is not Anonymous and what's really cool about it too is that your manager has visibility into it so if you've been having really good collaboration opportunities it's a great way to have some of that documented because again managers don't see absolutely everything and if you're able to get some of that positive feedback documented that can be a great thing to add in now positive feedback aside if someone has constructive criticism for you I admit this is kind of rare to see in a tool like this because people are generally shying away from trying to not be mean or anything like that even though there are some uh you know really helpful ways to do this if you do get constructive feedback again try not to panic try not to say oh no now my manager is going to see that I have something to improve on this is again an opportunity where you can take something like this put it into your connect talk about how you plan to address that right hey someone gave you feedback and they were suggesting that uh some project you were working on maybe didn't go as smoothly there were some communication gaps and you could say yeah if I reflect on that maybe there's a better way that I could have communicated these things maybe next time I'll make sure to include my status updates or whatever the circumstances have to be you can take some ownership here and communicate in your connect or your performance document whatever you're using to be able to explain what you're going to do better as Engineers become more and more senior in their roles there is an expectation that they are having more and more collaboration across teams to have bigger impact so leveraging things like perspectives or just documented feedback from other peers especially on different teams is a really awesome addin to all of this and the final tip that I want to add in here is kind of back to the beginning of connects where I was saying most people have a challenge when they're talking about their accomplishments and that's because they forget them now there are many different ways that you can try doing this I don't think there's a one siiz fits-all type of thing but I do think finding a way that works for you to document some of your accomplishments along the way is an excellent way to do it now that could look like something like once a week you're taking some notes maybe at the end of every day maybe once a month I don't know what the Cadence needs to be for you something you'll want to think about but the other thing to layer into this is how you're going to document that it could be something like a draft email to yourself I've seen that work really well it could be in your notebook maybe you have a spot where you can say for this period I'm going to be recording my accomplishments now I know when I go to write my connect I can refer back to that you can use any number of note taking tools that are digital whatever it happens to be there's many tools you can use and you need to think about what's going to work effectively for you if if you're trying it and it's not working cuz it feels like there's a lot of friction try something else it's totally cool personally I go between things like notebooks and whiteboards so if I need to track something long term I probably want to find a better way than either of those two things because I mean some of the stuff on my whiteboard has hung around for far too long but generally something like a draft email works well for me or at Microsoft I do leverage things like Loop or one note so those are two tools that I found work well for me now there is something else that floats around on the internet and that is called a brag document there's many variations of this and I wanted to end this video by letting you know that I do have a free brag document that you can check out at this link up here that way if you're interested in seeing some tool that might help you you can come up with your own variation of this it's literally just a structured document that lets you take notes in different categories that way when you're going through your connector your performance doc you can say great I had some of these accomplishments across these categories let me translate those into my performance document so again I'll have the link above you can check that out it's totally free you don't have to pay a dime and you're obviously welcome to customize it to your liking and your needs so I hope you found that helpful thanks and I'll see you next time