Performance Review Writing

Parent: Writing and Documentation · researched 2026-05-29T19:03:25.047Z· 7 sources · 12 concepts · skill performance-review-writing

Performance reviews are not new information — they are synthesis. The cardinal rule is "no surprises": anything that appears in a written review should already have been said in a one-on-one.

Overview

Performance reviews are not new information - they are synthesis. The cardinal rule is "no surprises": anything that appears in a written review should already have been said in a one-on-one. [source]

1. The "no surprises" rule

If a written performance review contains feedback the employee is hearing for the first time, the manager has failed earlier in the year. [source]

2. SBI (Situation-Behavior-Impact) — Center for Creative Leadership

Situation - When and where the behavior occurred. [source]
Behavior - What the person actually did. Observable, factual, non-interpretive. [source]
Impact - What followed from the behavior. [source]
Example (negative): [source]
> Situation: In the design review for the refund system on March 12. Behavior: You interrupted the junior engineer three times. Impact: She stopped contributing to the discussion, and we lost her input on the rollback design. [source]
Example (positive): [source]
> Situation: During the Q2 incident on April 8. Behavior: You took on the comms role within five minutes. Impact: The CSMs were able to respond to customers without paging engineers. [source]

3. The "behavior + impact + recommendation" structure for review bullets

Weak: "Sarah is a great team player and is always willing to help." [source]
Strong: "Sarah led the cross-team migration of the billing service in Q2, partnering with three teams and coordinating four deployment windows; the migration shipped two weeks ahead of plan with zero customer-visible incidents. Next step: I'd like to see Sarah take on a bigger system design role in Q4." [source]

4. Growth-area framing (not "weakness")

Weakness phrasing (avoid): "Tom is too quiet in meetings." [source]
Growth-area phrasing (use): "In larger forums (5+ people), Tom contributes less than I think he could. He has the strongest understanding of the search service on the team, but in the Q3 architecture reviews his ideas often landed in the followup chat rather than in the meeting itself. Growth focus for next cycle: Tom and I have agreed he'll lead two of the next four architecture reviews." [source]

5. Radical Candor — Kim Scott

Two axes: how much you care personally about the person, and how directly you challenge them. [source]
Radical Candor: Care + Challenge. The target. [source]
Ruinous Empathy: Care without challenge. Soft, vague, no real feedback. The most common manager failure mode. [source]
Obnoxious Aggression: Challenge without care. [source]
The failure mode in writing is almost always Ruinous Empathy - burying real feedback in praise sandwich. [source]

6. Camille Fournier's patterns

Lead with strengths, not weaknesses. [source]
Use concrete examples or cut the point. [source]
Negative feedback goes in private. [source]
Most of your time should go to talents and achievements. [source]

7. Evidence-based claims with concrete examples

Every assertion should be tied to a specific example. Sweeping claims without examples are the single biggest source of perceived unfairness. [source]
Weak: "She has strong communication skills." [source]
Strong: "When the platform migration ran into the dependency issue on the search team, she wrote the four-paragraph summary that unblocked the cross-team decision." [source]

8. Self-review traps

False-modesty traps: [source]
Hedging with "I tried to" and "I worked on" instead of "I led" and "I shipped." [source]
Crediting the team for outcomes you personally drove. [source]
Listing the work without claiming the result. [source]
The fix: "I led the migration; the team of four shipped it" beats both "I migrated the system" (overclaim) and "We migrated the system" (underclaim). [source]

9. Bias-checking before submission

Are claims tied to behaviors and outcomes, or to personality? [source]
Have I used different language for different people on the same team for the same observed behavior? [source]
Have I disproportionately commented on style versus substance? [source]

Anti-example: the "praise sandwich"

> "Maria is a wonderful teammate and a hard worker. She sometimes can be a bit late on deliverables but overall she's been a great addition to the team." [source]
The real feedback ("late on deliverables") is buried in vague praise, has no specific example, and gives Maria no idea what to change. [source]

References

Radical Candor - Our Approach (Kim Scott) [source]
Camille Fournier - The Manager's Path (O'Reilly, 2017) [source]
Center for Creative Leadership - SBI Feedback Model [source]

Children

No children recorded.

← the whole tree · 3D view· how to read this page