“often wordy” <snork!>
But they may have changed in two weeks!!!
Now, it might be because I’ve been involved in researchy type things, but I’ve never once sat in a performance review meeting where performance against the objectives stated at the beginning of the year counted at all.
The benefit of accomplishment lists is that when a boss who doesn’t like someone says they didn’t do anything, other managers can say “what about that?”
However for the most part the results would be pretty much the same if managers came in with nothing. People usually know - or think they know - the relative rankings.
Best example: in one meeting I was in a guy who was in charge of the arsenide gas in a chem lab came up. It took only a slight hint that if this guy screwed up we’d all die to have everyone approve a good rating for him.
In any case, years where there is no money for raises makes the whole thing kind of futile.
What? 
You probably can get by without listing weaknesses.
When I was a hiring manager, lots of questions like that would
have been added to application forms by prior managers.
I had no interest in the questions and ignored them.
I was asked this once in an interview for a promotion. Because I knew the head of the company well, I gave a semi-sardonic answer (“If anything, I just work too darned hard”), but followed up with something more serious about having difficulty delegating. In this case, though, where you fear the answer could be used against you, I think your boss is doing the right thing by dragging his feet about passing on any answer at all to your boss’ boss. Can’t help, could hurt, so don’t go there.
Good luck with whatever happens!
Yeah, emm., come back when it’s all over and let us know how it shook out.
-His bones are as brittle as corn flakes
-Often he cannot figure out of he’s incontinent or constipated until he’s in the bathroom
-Tinsel frightens him
-He’s deathly allergic to aluminum foil
-He has wake apnea
-His blood is poisonous to everyone except himself, so he has to withdraw pints of it every few months which leaves him exhausted
-He thinks vampires are real and tries to eliminate them “with extreme prejudice”
-He was the voice of Jar Jar Binks
-His foot odor has been described as “lethal”
-He’s president of his local NAMBLA chapter
-He currently has an active hit on his head by the Mafia
emmaliminal’s biggest fault is that he/she has no faults.
I was never asked, but what I thought of was,
“I’m not bi-lingual.”
It wouldn’t be a requirement for any of the jobs I was applying for.
David
You do NOT list your faults. NO NO NO NO!!! Don’t burn yourself!
You say things listed above:
I expect nothing but the best from myself and others
I am detail-oriented.
If I don’t know the answer to a question, I will search high and low to find one!
I take a lot of pride in my work.
~VOW
Weaknesses:
Workaholic
Giving too much credit to superiors for results of my own hard work
Obsessed with staying on schedule and on budget
Don’t ask for enough compensation
Too willing to pick up the slack for others
Never use season tickets for major sports and have to give them away
I hate being wrong and do all that I can to make sure I’m not.
For the win.
Really, do you think bosses fall for this “my weakness is I’m a workaholic” bullshit? Do you think you will “burn” yourself if you say an actual legitimate weakness like “I would like to improve my public speaking?” As a boss, I aready know what I think your weaknesses are. I want to see if you are aware of them and are working to improve them.
msmith537, it’s not your own boss you worry about. The skip level or higher may care less. Your own boss leaves and a new boss from hell comes in. Don’t make a paper trail that some manage by excel dickweed could possibly use to decide you’re one of the 5% that need to be managed out every year under some asinine corporate imperative. The paper trail is never about your manager, but either your next manager, someone higher in the food chain, some HR fuckhead, or a spreadsheet jockey trying to hit some numbers goal.
Are you by any chance Scott Adams? Because you sound like Dilbert. If so, stick with the comic biz.
How about something like: refuses to bad mouth himself to others, but would like to take classes to strengthen skills in: _______
I guess.
I feel people are approaching this in the same misguided way they apply for jobs. They try to craft the perfect paperwork (ie resume) and then wonder why no one calls. The reason is nobody is pouring through all this paperwork.
Or like people asking for the perfect answer to various interview questions. As an interviewer no one has ever told me what the correct answer is to “what are your weaknesses” or “why do you want to join this company”!
In my experience, which is mostly at consulting firms and professional services companies, we basically rank all staff from best to worst. We may reference review forms and paperwork, but for the most part it all comes down to a committee discussion based more or less on “feel” and their billable hours.
I’m curious how many people giving advice here are actual managers and what their experience with this stuff is.
Bullets.
Probably no one who thinks managers are dumb enough to fall for the “I work too hard” shtick.
On the other hand, interviewers who ask about weaknesses haven’t put a lot of effort into thinking about what they are looking for, and must be getting their questions from some stupid magazine article. My questions probe about whether the candidate actually understands what is on his or her resume, (people in tech sometimes put down impressive sounding projects which are actually trivial) and if they can abstract from the facts they know.
BTW, when you rank people, do you actually do a 1 - N ranking? We did what my boss called natural ranking, where there were sets of people who were more or less indistinguishable, and should go together in the four or five categories we had to bucket them into. His criteria was that if you couldn’t distinguish them after about five minutes they should go together.
I’ve seen both. At one place I worked, in was 1-N, along with a recommendation for promotion or bonus (you could be in a top spot in that you were doing your job well, but we thought a person might need a bit more experience before they move to the next level). Other places had a forced bucketing. 25% had to be A, 50% B, 25% C. That prevented managers from saying “my whole team is a bunch of A performers” I suppose.
The whole evaluation process is BS anyway. It’s not about helping to “develop” you. It’s a mechanism for the company to exert its power by reminding everyone once a year that everything you do or say should be about pleasing the company.