What do you do if your team's performance evaluations could benefit from self-assessment?

1 Why self-assessment?

Self-assessment is not only beneficial for your team members, but also for you as a team leader. By encouraging your team members to self-assess their performance, you can foster a culture of feedback, learning, and collaboration in your team. Self-assessment can also help you reduce bias, avoid surprises, and align expectations in your performance evaluations. Additionally, self-assessment can increase your team members' motivation, engagement, and satisfaction, as they can see their progress and achievements more clearly, and set realistic and meaningful goals for themselves.

2 How to introduce self-assessment?

One of the challenges of introducing self-assessment to your team is to overcome the potential resistance or skepticism that some team members may have. To do this, you need to communicate the purpose, benefits, and expectations of self-assessment clearly and positively. You can also involve your team members in the design and implementation of the self-assessment process, and solicit their feedback and suggestions along the way. Moreover, you need to provide your team members with adequate support and guidance on how to conduct self-assessment effectively, such as providing them with relevant criteria, tools, and examples.

3 What to include in self-assessment?

Self-assessment can cover various aspects of your team members' performance, such as their skills, knowledge, behaviors, attitudes, achievements, and challenges. Depending on your team's context and objectives, you can ask your team members to self-assess their performance in relation to specific projects, tasks, roles, or competencies. You can also ask them to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses, their goals and action plans, their feedback and learning needs, and their contributions and impacts. The key is to make the self-assessment relevant, specific, and meaningful for your team members.

4 How to collect self-assessment?

There are different ways to collect self-assessment from your team members, such as surveys, questionnaires, forms, journals, portfolios, or presentations. You can choose the method that best suits your team's preferences, needs, and resources. However, regardless of the method you choose, you should ensure that the self-assessment is timely, consistent, and confidential. You should also encourage your team members to be honest, objective, and constructive in their self-assessment, and avoid being too harsh or too lenient on themselves.

5 How to use self-assessment?

Self-assessment is not a one-time event, but a continuous process that should inform and enhance your team's performance evaluation and development. Therefore, you should use self-assessment as a basis for dialogue, feedback, and coaching with your team members, and not as a substitute or a justification for your own evaluation. You should also use self-assessment to recognize and celebrate your team members' achievements, and to identify and address their challenges and gaps. Furthermore, you should use self-assessment to align and adjust your team members' goals and expectations, and to support and empower them to achieve them.