Manager review — Visualize to get the full picture

Recently, my team and I did our first Best Self and Upward Review(™) session. The session was structured as two surveys that each employee answered. One survey was the self-review; the other was the upward review. I want to demonstrate here, how visualizing the data helped me to understand the feedback deeper.

The Best Self Review

The best self-review is a set of questions for each engineer to reflect on their strengths and potentials to improve. It also includes some questions on how one lives the company values. Each team member answered the same set of questions. I, as the manager, filled out the same questions for each team member. Afterward, we had a one-on-one conversation comparing our answers and exchanged the detailed thoughts behind the answers.

The Upward Review

The upward review consisted of 13 questions borrowed from Google’s manager feedback process.

1. I would recommend my manager to others.
2. My manager assigns stretch opportunities to help me develop in my career.
3. My manager communicates clear goals for our team.
4. My manager gives me actionable feedback on a regular basis.
5. My manager provides the autonomy I need to do my job (i.e., does not “micro-manage” by getting involved in details that should be handled at other levels).
6. My manager consistently shows consideration for me as a person.
7. My manager keeps the team focused on priorities, even when it’s difficult (e.g., declining or deprioritizing other projects).
8. My manager regularly shares relevant information from their manager and senior leadership.
9. My manager has had a meaningful discussion with me about my career development in the past six months.
10. My manager has the technical expertise (e.g., technical judgment in Tech, selling in Sales, accounting in Finance) required to effectively manage me.
11. The actions of my manager show they value the perspective I bring to the team, even if it is different from their own.
12. My manager makes tough decisions effectively (e.g., decisions involving multiple teams, competing priorities).
13. My manager effectively collaborates across boundaries (e.g., team, organizational).

Added to these were three questions about how I live the core values of our company. The questions were answered on a range of “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree” or “never” to “always,” also known as a 5-point Likert Scale. Optionally, each engineer could add a comment to each question.

The team members’ answers were shared directly with my manager. My team opted for transparency as they agreed to share the detailed answers with me. My manager and I had a deep dive session to talk about the feedback. While the ratings on a scale of 1–5 were insightful, the optional comments appeared as more actionable feedback.

My manager coached me through an interpretation of the feedback. We talked about individual comments and how I could meet expectations better. We also talked about the overall picture of the ratings and how it compares to his views on my performance.

Together, we identified actions I can take to meet the needs of my team better. Then, we prioritized those and selected two as the objectives for the next half year.

1. Jointly writing an assessment of “my” (the engineer’s) career
2. Identifying individual growth opportunities and objectives

Visualization

Following the meeting with my manager, I reviewed the results one more time. I had the feeling that I missed something important in the many ratings. To make calculations on the data, I copied the ratings as 1–5 into a spreadsheet — one column for each question and a row for each engineer. As a first calculation, I added a row for the average rating for each question.

Next, I chose to visualize the data in a radar chart. This type of chart has an axis for each question with a scale of 1–5 on the axis. The data series I visualized is the average rating for each question.

The area inside the line represents my ability to lead the team effectively. The greater the area, the better I served my team as a leader.

The area outside the line reflects my growth potential.

Going beyond averages

I asked myself if my team agrees as a whole in their assessment. In order to investigate this question, I added minimum and maximum values to the table and the resulting data series to the chart.

This visualization makes it easy to identify questions where the maximum and minimum are close together. For example, on the question, “I would recommend my manager to others,” the answers varied between “neither agree nor disagree” [3] and agree [4]. No one answered “strongly agree” [5].

The chart also shows that the average for this question [= 3.88] is close to the maximum [4], telling me that most engineers would agree to recommend me as a manager. However, they would not give me a ringing endorsement.

Other questions showed minimum and maximum far apart. For example, “My manager assigns stretch opportunities to help me develop in my career” captures answers between “strongly disagree” [1] to “agree” [4]. This wide range prompted me to dig into the details. The average rating [= 2.63] is also close to the middle of the range [= 2.5], indicating that multiple engineers would like to have more clarity on goals and objectives and how they link to their career development.

Summary

Learning from feedback helps me to be the best manager I can be, and with the systematic review, it ensures that this is not lost in the daily noise of my job.

Reading my team’s feedback was certainly interesting, and discussing it with my manager helped me to set action items to serve my team better. However, visualizing the data made it easier to see what my team was telling me while the visualization allowed me to ask questions that I would not have asked before. It has been worth the additional effort required to visualize the data as I have a better understanding of what I am missing.

I published a follow up post with more valuable visualizations.