What managers want from junior employees

And how to perform better

Picture and typo courtesy of ChatGPT

It’s performance review season at my employer, so I’ve been thinking about what “good performance” means. If, like me, you’re a junior white-collar desk worker with an open-ended, cross-functional work portfolio, you might also have thought about this.¹

The problem is that I don’t have an objective metric that would be high if I had “good performance” and low if not. I wish I did, because then I could try really hard to make the number go up! But that’s unfortunately not my reality, and I’d guess it isn’t yours either if you have a work situation like the one I described above.

In fact, I can’t identify any quantitative metrics that seem to map very well to my performance. I spend 90% of my time on recruiting, so some possible metrics are:

• Number of screening calls. But I could just do tons of screening calls with unqualified candidates and completely break this metric. Same argument for passthrough rates, emails sent, sourcing messages sent, etc.

• Number of hires made. Better, but I don’t ultimately control who we hire, lots of other people do. And, budget changes or org headcount planning might affect the number of people we’re willing to hire.

• Percentage of hiring rounds successfully closed, with a candidate everyone’s happy about, within the target dates. Even better, but still I don’t really control this. Hiring round length is dependent on a lot of factors. If we suddenly realize that an interview or work test isn’t working, and re-do the hiring process, that’s not my fault. If we close a hiring round because we’ve changed our target profile, that’s also not my fault, and I’d dislike having it counted against me.

I think a lot of junior employees know that quantitative metrics don’t tell the full story about their performance, but experience a lot of anxiety because they know their performance will still be assessed and aren’t sure how managers will do it. The anxiety breaks down into questions like: Will managers rely too much on imperfect quantitative metrics? What does performance mean to my manager? Will their judgments be fair? Am I going to be blindsided by my performance review? How do I even know if I’m performing well?

How performance works

Ok, taking a step back: Almost all of you have worked on group projects in school. Think back to the experience of working on a group project² and try to remember what your teammates were like. If you were asked to describe their performance, how would you do it?

I’m guessing you wouldn’t only point to things like

• How many group meetings they showed up to

• How many pages they wrote

• How many minutes of the class presentation they took care of

You might point to those objective indicators if they were absolutely atrocious (for example, if someone showed up to 0 meetings and wrote 0 pages, it’s very unlikely that they were a high performer), but the numerical metrics are too fuzzy for most cases. You’d probably prefer the person who wrote 3 amazing pages over the person who wrote 6 pages of AI generated crap. You’d prefer the person who showed up to 1 meeting but finished their section early over the person who showed up to all the meetings but finished their section 3 days after the deadline. 

Ultimately, what matters is the quality of the person’s output, the usefulness of their ideas, and their overall contribution to pushing the project forward. You’d think it was silly if a group member who didn’t contribute anything to the project claimed they were a great group member because, “I showed up to all the meetings!” The numbers never tell the full story. If you had to fairly assess the performance of your group members, you’d be more likely to consider questions like:

• Did working with Calum on the group project add friction or reduce it?

• Did the project happen more quickly and more easily because Calum was in my group?

• Did Calum handle his workload, or did I have to worry about his tasks?

• Do I believe we got a better grade on the project because Calum was on my team?

• Would I seek out Calum to work on another group project with me in the future?

This is a direct analogue to how managers think about performance reviews. Like you with group projects, they consider performance subjectively. Performance is complex, and in most cases³ managers will attempt to understand it qualitatively, asking similar questions as the ones above.

So this is the important thing to understand about performance: In most cases, the bottom-line result of a performance review will be heavily influenced by qualitative judgements. Managers will rely on quantitative metrics and benchmarks when they’re available and useful, but even these metrics will be interpreted subjectively.

Assessing performance

A good manager will continually be holding and updating a view of their report’s performance over a review period (ideally, they’ll be communicating that view directly to their reports⁴ throughout the review period so reports know where they stand). To be very clear here: A good manager knows how you are performing all the time, even if performance reviews only happen at defined intervals during the year. The main criterion for “good performance” is producing large volumes of high-quality work, and it’s not difficult to tell if someone’s doing that.

Unfortunately, statements like “you produced a high volume of good work” (or the converse) aren’t very legible or actionable. Statements like “You completed X project well, and I think your work on that project was emblematic of general strengths that you bring to your work: A, B, and C” (or the converse) are actionable because they’re more precise and legible. So, during performance review season, managers work on communicating their pre-existing view of your performance into smaller, comprehensible components so they can write an actionable review.⁵

My personal list of the sub-qualities that matter a lot to good performance is this:

1. Productivity

2. Reliability

3. Organization-level alignment

4. Communication/legibility

5. Judgment/Initiative

I also include an extra quality that I think is required for excellent performance.

Productivity

Do you have high output on the relatively important problems within your portfolio?

Productivity only counts if it’s focused toward the highest-priority action items, as defined by the organization and your manager. If you’re really productive with the low-priority stuff, nobody cares. When people say “John Smith is so productive,” they are not making a claim about John’s absolute productivity levels. What they mean is “John Smith got a lot of the stuff that I think is important done.”

It’s hard to get more productive, but carving out time for prioritization and experimenting with a variety of productivity techniques can help you make big changes.

Reliability

Are you predictable, consistent, and trustworthy? Do you follow through? 

I wanted to say “integrity,” but that sounds too moralistic. Basically, most managers would prefer consistency over episodic spurts of activity. This applies to everything from general work schedule for remote/flex employees (“Can I assume that they’re going to be online when I want to talk to them?”) to personal followthrough (“If they say they’re going to do something, will they do it? If they can’t do it, will they follow up immediately?”)

If your manager believes that they can throw a project at you and never need to think about it again because you’ll take care of it, you are reliable. If your manager believes that they’d need to check in on you regularly to ensure that a project is moving forward, you are not reliable. You want to be reliable.

Org-level alignment

To what extent do you make decisions that are in the best interests of the organization? How willing are you to trade off against personal interests when they conflict with org goals?

When I was a kitchen team member at Chick-fil-A, I often worked in the “secondary” position during lunch rush, where I was responsible for preparing and boxing hot menu items—think chicken nuggets and grilled chicken sandwiches—and passing them to baggers. Lunch rush is stressful because it can be really hard to keep up with the order flow. The worst thing of all is running out of chicken! If that happens, you won’t get any more for up to 6 minutes, and by that time you’ll have a huge backlog of orders, people will be yelling at you, etc.

You can avoid running out of chicken, but you’ll need to develop some skill at estimating both the time required to obtain new chicken, and the consumption rate of your current chicken. Computers do some but not all of this estimation work, so the experience of working on a busy lunch rush is stressful and mentally demanding.

“But wait a second,” you might say, “you could just request lots of chicken, well before you need it. Then you’ll never run out!” That’s true, and decisions like this are what make the difference between org-level alignment, and not. If you request lots of chicken well before you run out, you will certainly have a much easier time keeping the pace, and you’ll have less overall cognitive load. But also:

• The chicken will get cold while it waits, so you won’t be providing the high-quality customer experience that the restaurant requires you to provide. Customers might notice.

• You’ll be asking the breader to sequence his work differently, potentially trading off against other urgent needs and slowing down another part of the restaurant

You can rationalize all of these things, of course. “What are the odds that someone actually gets unhappy with chicken that’s a few degrees less hot than normal? Seems fairly low to me.” But when you rationalize, you’re making decisions that optimize for your comfort and satisfaction, rather than decisions that optimize for the organization’s goals.

Most jobs will require you to make decisions about what to prioritize with your time. Occasionally, your interests and the organization’s interests will conflict,⁶ and you’ll be a higher performer if you choose to promote the latter. Managers hand complex projects and decisions to people who they can trust to promote the organization’s interests. You want to be one of those people.

Communication/legibility

How easy is it to understand what you say and what you want? Do your communications make things happen more quickly?

Good communication can make things happen smoothly and increase employee morale. Bad communication can ruin relationships and derail projects. Communication is time-consuming to get right, sensitive to small adjustments, and very consequential.

If you communicate well with your manager, you can help them manage their workload and turn around your projects more quickly. Whenever you ask for your manager’s input,⁷ you should always consider including the following components, ordered from most vital to least:

• What you want from your manager and how you want them to deliver the feedback. This is the biggest thing that people get wrong—you’d be surprised by how many managers receive incomprehensible messages from their reports and need to read them three or four times before they understand what they’re being asked to do.

• If applicable, the finish level of the product—are you presenting a rough or a final draft?

• Your proposed solution and your confidence in your proposal. Be honest about your confidence level, or people will stop taking you seriously over time.

• The importance level and deadline. Be honest here too; don’t inflate your project’s importance level just because it’s your project. For extra points, you can share your proposed importance level relative to other things that you know are on your manager’s plate.

• The bottom-line⁸ bad and good outcomes.

• Your default plan if your manager chooses not to weigh in. It’s ok to say “I’m going to do X if you don’t respond by end of Friday,” just make sure you give your manager enough time to review your request.

I’ve deliberately not included advice to be very circumspect or deferential. That’s because I think most people dramatically overweight the importance of being extremely respectful and cautious in their professional messaging⁹ and underestimate managers’ desire to just get stuff done quickly.

You’ve probably encountered someone who’s a snappy, action-oriented communicator—everything just flows when you work with them, and as a result everyone is excited when they’re part of a project. You want to be that person.

Judgment/Initiative

Do you make good decisions and proactively execute them?

These are mashed together because they’re symbiotic!! Initiative helps develop better judgment, which helps develop confidence to take initiative.

By “judgment”, I’m trying to get at the idea of “making decisions that closely approximate the decisions your manager would make.” To have good judgment, you don’t need to get everything right all the time. If your decisions are 70% as good most of the time and you try to push your rates higher over time, that’s alright. Judgment is also contextual: A risk-averse crisis communications consultancy and a tech startup will have different definitions of good judgment.

Initiative is simple to explain: Some people do things once they’ve made judgment calls, and some people burn both time and their manager’s mental energy looking for approval. People with initiative act, people without it wait.

Your judgment will start off pretty bad and unaligned with your organization’s interests. This isn’t terrible or unexpected—even if you have the capacity for good judgment, you’ll need time to develop it. Managers understand this and often don’t have an expectation that their reports (especially junior reports) will by default have very good judgment.¹⁰

Initiative is easier to develop first, and it will supercharge your efforts to develop better judgment. That’s because you develop better judgment by getting feedback, but you can’t get feedback without producing something (or, without personally investing yourself in an opinion). That means you have to actually put yourself out there and do stuff with your current level of knowledge. You’ll get lots of stuff wrong, and that’s ok—your managers will not expect you to get everything right, and they’ll appreciate that you’re trying to increase your hit rate over time. They will prefer initiative over timidity.

To practice your initiative, you should focus on low-risk decision-making (i.e. things that will not cost huge amounts of money or cause other bad effects if they go wrong). Just make a decision on something small without checking in with your manager first, then see what happens and ask for feedback if you want. You should not practice your initiative with high-risk issues.

When you’re practicing, keep in mind that people find it much easier to review ideas than to generate ideas. So, whenever it’s possible, ask for feedback on a real thing¹¹ rather than a concept. For example,

• This question will not make it easy for your manager to give useful feedback: “What should I say to John Smith after he sent me this email?”

• This question will make feedback very easy to give: “John Smith said X, I drafted a response in this Google Doc. Can you suggest any edits?”

Again, initiative and judgment must go together. An armchair sage who doesn’t do anything is useless. Someone who has high initiative but bad judgment is harmful. But high initiative and good judgment together are a powerful combination, and you’ll perform more highly if you develop both.

Bonus: Personal partnership

Does your manager want to talk about their problems with you?

I think you can be a good performer without personal partnership, but you probably need it to be an excellent performer. There are so many little qualities this breaks into:

• All of the things I’ve already listed: You have to possess all the qualities of a good performer, otherwise you won’t be brought in to solve higher-level problems.

• Empathy: You need to understand how your manager’s problems feel and why they’re important.

• Humility: You need to be ok with helping find solutions for other people and receiving no public recognition in return. When you get into projects that are outside of the scope of your role, you’ll almost always be a contributor and a helper, not an owner or a decider.

• Discretion: You need to be able to keep sensitive information to yourself.

Personal partnership dramatically expands the scope of work that you have exposure to and correspondingly expands the areas in which you’re able to add value. It’s good if you can handle your normal work well. It’s better if you can also contribute to problems outside of your normal areas.

How to get better

Maybe you’ve looked at one or several qualities on the list above and thought:

• I don’t have this quality at all, how do I change that?

• I’m not sure if I have this quality, how would I check?

• I’m strong on this quality, but how can I get even better?

I’ll likely write more on this later, but I think the basic answer to all of these questions is to start soliciting feedback from your manager and teammates.¹² You can just ask people questions like “Do you think I’m productive?”, “Do I seem reliable?”, “How do you think my communications could improve?”, and “I’d like to develop better judgment—could you help me work on that?” Most of the time, people will give you useful feedback.

It can feel tough to ask such questions because they require you to be vulnerable¹³ and open yourself to critical, painful feedback. But, if you can bring yourself to push through the negative feelings, you can do a lot to gain more control of your performance, and you’ll likely end up happier in the long term.

Best of luck with your performance reviews!

1. I’d guess this worry is most applicable to roles outside of sales and customer service, where it’s somewhat harder to directly see the impact of your work on revenue increases or other obvious good things. I think there are also industries and companies with ostensibly rigorous performance frameworks, but I assume these frameworks ultimately boil down to subjective assessments of the sorts of qualities I talk about below.

2. If you’re like…literally every person I’ve talked to, you probably remember yourself as the person who did all the work and carried the team. One day I hope to meet someone who didn’t do any work and failed the team, but I think they must be shunted into an alternate universe after graduation.

3. Again, if you’re in e.g. sales and your goal is “bring in lots of money”, your performance is a little easier to assess objectively, though I’d guess there are complicating factors even in situations that initially seem clear cut. For example, salespeople could argue about the quality of their assigned sales regions, leads, etc.

4. Some organizations don’t have a culture that encourages constant feedback or direct communication. In those cases, if you want direct feedback, you should just ask for it. I feel pretty confident that asking for developmental feedback will ~never turn out poorly.

5. They also decide if any raises, promotions, or performance improvement plans should happen, and step back and consider if they could/should have shared any of the performance information sooner, but these are less important for this essay.

6. In many cases, they won’t. It’s a good idea to try to hire people whose personal interests align very closely with organizational interests.

7. The same communication advice applies to literally everyone though, not just your manager.

8. By “bottom-line”, I mean “the answer that you’d give if someone asked you ‘So what? Why does this matter?’ five times in a row.” That’s the question that your manager will be thinking, so answer it.

9. I’m absolutely not saying that respect isn’t important. It is!! Be respectful!

10. In my experience, managers of junior employees often say “I don’t expect Employee X to get things right all the time, but I do want them to raise confusing issues to me so I can help out.” Basically, they’re worried that their reports’ judgment might actually be unaligned, so they don’t want them to take initiative in all situations. But at the same time, they don’t equate unaligned judgment with bad performance.

11. This blog exists in part to help me develop good judgment. I write drafts of posts, get critical feedback from my manager, friends, and other managers, and develop better ideas as a result. If I just asked someone “what do you think managers want?” without showing them a draft of my ideas, I’d likely get less interesting and useful feedback. While I’m here, thanks to P, E, A, and U for your commentary on this post, and B for inspiring me to think carefully about performance.

12. But don’t limit yourself here! I routinely get very useful feedback from people who I only work with on isolated projects. Anyone who has direct insight into your work product is a potential source of good feedback.

13. You’re potentially revealing levels of self-consciousness and ambition that feel uncomfortable to display.