Your manager recently told you that you did a good job on a project. This is great news, but how can you assess for yourself that you are doing well? This becomes a tougher question the further you progress in your career as there are fewer established metrics to base your assessment on.
In college, a good student will have a high GPA. In a doctoral degree, your GPA might be somewhat irrelevant if you do a good job in the lab or on a project. As you venture further from standardized institutions assessment becomes more subjective as it depends on the people above you providing guidance on what is acceptable and what is not. Thus, your ability to self-assess becomes more valuable in order to know if you are doing a good job and where you need to improve. Ideally your self-assessment should be objective, after all what gets measured gets improved.
One example that is relevant to almost every job, and which most people can relate to, is giving a presentation. I have seen hundreds of presentations during my academic career and given my fair share of them as well. One of the scientific conferences I attend is an international event that brings together over 15,000 people. No matter the year, there is always a diversity in the quality of presentations at all levels of the career ladder.
You can start to develop a benchmark by considering the collective reasoning of those attending the same presentation as well as your own initial opinions. The goal is to get a feel for the bell curve of presentation quality and to identify what qualifies as average and outstanding.
The next step is to develop a set of criteria that you can use to evaluate your performance. Start this process by observing what the bottom, middle, and top performers did that stood out to you. Once you have watched a few talks and have a list, categorize your list into key areas which you can call your performance metrics. Try to limit your number of performance metrics to no more than five or so, otherwise it may be hard to remember and cumbersome to implement a process for improvement. For each metric, develop a scale so that you can identify a range of performance within that metric. The scale should be relative to your current level of performance. For example, someone just starting to run might be able to shave off minutes from their time while an elite athlete might only be able to cut off seconds.
Once you have your criteria, the next step is to start applying them. If you have recordings of the presentations that you watched while developing your criteria you can re-watch them to see how they measure up. You can also use your criteria during the next few presentations you attend. The goal at this stage of the assessment tool development is to gain an awareness of what you consider to be good vs great. You can then start identifying techniques, strategies, and tools employed by the top performers. This will allow you to see what you are doing in comparison to what others are doing in both the formatting and execution of a presentation.
In order to improve, it is critical that you record yourself when practicing as well as when giving your presentation. Video with audio is the best, but if all you can manage is audio that is much better than nothing. You can’t self-assess your performance if you don’t have a set of metrics and if you don’t have the content to evaluate.
Once you have identified areas where you can improve, the hard part is implementing changes to get your desired results. Consider whether this is something you can do on your own or if you should consult a coach. You are building a system for continuous improvement, and so you will need to monitor the outcomes. If you hit a plateau in your performance, you will need to decide if that level of performance is good enough given the context of the situation.
Although the example given was for evaluating presentations, self-assessment and continuous improvement can be applied to any context. The goal is to develop a set of criteria (if one doesn’t already exist) and to use them to track and evaluate your performance. Remember that as your performance and the expectations of you change over time, so too should your evaluation criteria.
Andrew Kuczmarski is a PhD candidate at the University of Delaware whose passion lies at the intersection of science and business.
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