Performance Evaluations: A Guide to Setting Goals, Providing Feedback, and Improving Your Developer Team’s Success
One of the hardest tasks as a leader, manager of developers is to perform performance evaluations and assessments. How do you really assess technical performance taking in consideration their experience and seniority? After all, it’s important to provide feedback to your team and to receive feedback in turn. Many managers really hate this part of the job. It can be stressful when you aren’t looking forward to delivering feedback that is less than completely positive. Even when the feedback is positive, you might still have anxieties that your feedback will not hit the mark with your developer team members. Either way, we want to avoid conflict, right?
It’s part of your job description to do performance reviews, to improve the health and performance of your team or teams. It should be your goal to go into a review meeting with sound reasoning to back up the feedback you are going to provide, good or bad. For this article, we are going to discuss ways to setup your review pre-work and provide observation points to support your assessments prior to your reviews. Brace yourself. This is going to be crash course of high level ideas that merely touch the surface but that outline a plan of action.
