Self evaluation

Hello, my name is Neil Morrison. I'm the director of the Strategy, Culture and Innovation at Penguin Random House UK, and I'm also a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personal and Development. And I'd like to talk about self-evaluation, and self-assessment, and the importance, doing this in the workplace.

In this session, what we'll look at, is the value of personal goals, why it's important to set them and how to set them. We'll look at seeking feedback, the best ways of doing that and how to ensure that you get really good quality feedback. We'll look at the evaluation tools that often exist within businesses, the different types of tools and how they can be used and how they can be complementary. We'll touch on continuous learning and the importance of the growth mindset. And finally, we'll finish by my five top tips for self-evaluation and self-assessment in the workplace.

So let's start then by looking at the value of personal goals. And by personal goals, I really want to differentiate between those corporate goals that are set maybe as part of an induction plan, or part of a performance review by a manager, those things that are important to a business, and the personal ones that are really valuable to an individual. Personal goals are hugely important in helping anyone to manage their career, to be successful in their work, and to be successful in their role in their organization. So for example, a corporate goal might be something like, I want you to increase revenue in these streams by X%. The personal goals can be things around how you want to behave within an organization. It might be that you want to have a better chance of contributing in certain meetings. And setting good targets and good goals are really important in helping anyone to progress. So for example, let's take the situation of the meeting. It might be saying, "In the next meeting that I go into, I want to try and express myself more in terms of the agenda items that we're talking about and I want to make sure that my voice is heard." Or it might be saying, "I want to better understand the financial systems that operate in this organization because I've now got a budget that I manage, I'm now in charge of a team of people and it's important for me that I can convey to them what the financial position on what the situation is." Now those personal goals are really about your development and the things that are important to you in progressing your career. So working out what's important, often that's really simple, it can be something that's just you feel individually you want to do. But sometimes it can be around understanding what makes success in the next role that your looking at, or what it would take to join a particular team, or how you might move from one organization to another. And in order to do that you have to be expansive in the way that you source data. So when we're talking about promotions, often people will look at the person that's in the job above them and you know, this is human nature, and say to themselves, "I can do that". And it can lead to a level of frustration about why you're not progressing or why you're not moving. One of the things that you can actually do is, go and understand what makes someone successful in that role? What are the criteria that would be there? And therefore, how do I set my goals to allow myself to achieve those things and to progress to be able to do that? So seeking out different sources of data, seeking out different sources of information and setting good targets and good goals really can be very very helpful. So when we talk about good goals what do we mean?