Home / The Playbook / Month 6 / Run Your First Review Cycle
Month 6 · Move 03

Run your first full review cycle deliberately.

This is the first time your written word about someone becomes part of their record. Treat it that way, specific, fair, and something you'd stand behind if they read it twice.

A review written under deadline pressure, from memory, reads that way. The managers who write reviews people trust are the ones who weren't reconstructing the last six months from scratch the night before.

Collect specifics as you go, not the week before
A running note per person, updated as things happen, beats trying to remember six months of context in one sitting.
Calibrate with peers before you finalize anything
Find out what "meets" versus "exceeds" actually looks like at your company before you commit words to a document. Your bar is probably off in one direction.
Draft the hardest one first
The review you're dreading is the one most likely to get rushed if you save it for last.
Rehearse the delivery, not just the document
A well-written review delivered badly still lands badly. Say the key lines out loud before the meeting.
Example

"Good work this quarter" tells someone nothing about what to keep doing. "Your rollout plan for the billing migration is why that launch had zero incidents, keep building that kind of plan before every risky change" tells them exactly what to repeat. Specific enough that they'd recognize the moment you're describing.

Use the script

The Performance Review Script covers the structure of the conversation itself.

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The Hard Middle: Month 6
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