The dreaded performance review

So – have you done anything useful in the last year? If you’re autistic your first response may be for your mind to go blank. Clearly you haven’t done anything useful at ALL. After a bit of grubbing around in your memory you come up with the fact that you wrote a report on paperclip filing in the Walthamstow or something equally uninspiring. (If you’re an inspirational paperclip filer in Walthamstow – please accept my apologies.) What was the result of your report? Well – some people may have read it, or more likely they deleted it unread. So – in fact – have you made the world a better place in the last year? It doesn’t look like it.

April is the time of year when a lot of managers and employees find themselves reviewing performance over the last year. It coincides with the start of a new financial year so is a good moment to look back. But it’s a stressful thing to do if you’re not a confident person, and it can play to many of the autistic fallibilities. You, the employee, have to tell your manager what you’ve achieved in the last year and what skills and qualities you’ve used in achieving it. Put crudely, an end of year performance review is like an interview on whether you’ve done a good job for the last year. It might be great, encouraging and seeking to get the best out of you, or it might be an opportunity for a manager who doesn’t really like autistic people to put the boot in well and truly.

I recently did my end of year performance review with my manager who is kind, supportive, and good at working with my autistic brain. I went through the inevitable moment of not having any recall of anything useful I’d done in the year. (This is in spite of the fact that I’d prepared in advance – autistically – and had a lot of notes. My brain is just NOT good at remembering positives about me.) Mercifully my manager didn’t give up when I finally came out with the equivalent of the paperclip filing report. Which is better than nothing but not representative of my year.

It’s much easier for me to talk about things that I literally and definitely did – for example: write a report, organise a meeting – than outcomes I achieved. It’s the exact same problem I have with job interviews and job applications. I know that I wrote that paperclip report – I have a copy filed on my computer that I can produce on request. So that feels completely comfortable to talk about. I only like to rely on things that are provably true – it’s part of the honesty thing. Unfortunately, when bigging yourself up in an interview or a performance review you need to be able to talk about how the world was different and better as a result of what you did.

Rather than “I wrote a report” I needed to be able to say something like “I reviewed paperclip filing in Walthamstow, discovered a number of inefficiencies, set out the evidence explaining how things could be better and persuaded the high and mighty of Walthamstow to adopt my new system, thereby saving a million pounds in wasted poor paperclip filing”. Or similar. You get the idea. But my autistic brain doesn’t think like that – I overthink things and worry that (say) the good people of Walthamstow might have been persuaded to change their paperclip filing because of things they read on the news not because of me, or actually maybe only £999,999 was saved, or perhaps the savings were caused by something else entirely. So I don’t feel I can say I was responsible for those things – maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t 100% down to me? If it was 99%, can I take credit? And so I fall back on the thing that I definitely 100% did – namely wrote the report. And fail to say anything about the fact that what I communicated in and with my report made the world a bit better. As regards paperclips. In Walthamstow.

Luckily for me, my manager persisted and coaxed me into explaining actually how I had, in my small way, made the world a better place in the last year. And so I did OK out of the end of year review. But suppose my manager hadn’t been kind like that? It’s a sad truth that its we autistics who suffer first and worst from poor management, and too many of us are written off as worthless because we freeze and then go all procedural and literal when asked about our achievements.

You may well be autistic yourself, in which case I’m fairly sure that you will autistically-efficiently have got all your end of year performance reviews done by this stage of April. But if you haven’t, please do consider how to get the best out of whoever you’re doing one with. They may be terrified because of previous bad experiences or just really really bad at selling themselves. The fact that someone can’t do self-promotion doesn’t mean they can’t do the job – it’d be nice if that was better and more deeply understood.