Write Your Own Report Card: Evaluating Yourself When Leading at a Startup

Do you allow externalities to determine your value as a leader, or do you keep your own score?

 Gain actionable perspective utilizing healthy, balanced self-reporting. 

Performance evaluation. The word itself is tricky; on the one hand, if you interpret it literally, evaluation is the process of determining the worth or value of something. So, when you undergo a performance evaluation it makes sense that you feel like you are being judged (you are). It makes sense that you feel like some measurement of your worth or value is on the line (it is). But there is a critical and nuanced distinction to draw here.

First

While your worth or value in the role you play is up for debate during an evaluation process, your fundamental self-worth is not. This is where many founders and early-stage startup leaders start to lose their way. They are so used to tying up their self-worth - their sense of love and belonging - in their companies' performance that they lose track of the point at which, for the sake of their personal growth and that of the company, that distorted belief no longer serves them. 

Once upon a time, I played a (well-meaning) trick on a small group of 4 founder-CEOs I had gathered for a retreat. I assigned them an exercise to “evaluate their self-worth as a founder-CEO” by calculating their “Maximum Worthiness Score” as a function of various factors that I knew from my coaching experience many founders misguidedly reference to feel more worthy. I included things such as: company’s valuation; what investors/Board think of my performance; how well I am performing compared to peer Founder-CEOs, how happy my DRs/teammates/employees are. 

The founders very diligently completed the exercise, reflecting on where they were doing well and where they weren’t. And beating themselves up accordingly. Then, when they turned the page there was a surprise waiting for them. Guess what? I said. None of those things determines your self-worth. To be clear, some of those things might be relevant to evaluate your performance in your role (while some of the factors might actually be misleading and not correlate with performance). In the end, you are the final authority of your self-worth: You decide if you’re worthy of love and belonging.

Second

So, the first error is not drawing a distinction between your value in playing a role and your value as a person. Then, the second compounding error is when you hand over too much power and control to other people to evaluate you (and determine your self-worth).

I believe this second error arises when leaders fear their own power. It can feel daunting, scary, or lonely to evaluate ourselves, by ourselves. Some part of us yearns to be taken care of, to have a benevolent “boss” figure who can affirm us when we’re doing well and lovingly get in our face when we’re not. The thought of having to do that for yourself is unnerving, so instead of looking inward we reflexively (and sometimes dangerously) look outward. 

Third

To solve for both errors -- leaders must make some changes to how they approach self-evaluation, but underneath those process changes, and more importantly, they need to shift their psychology as well. 

Many of the leaders I coach are at some stage in a psychological transition to what I refer to in shorthand as “learning how to write their own report card.”

When you are “writing your own report card” you: 

• Understand and accept that you are not what you do. You are not your role. You perform your role but you are not inextricably linked.

• Set your expectations for yourself. Build your personal rubric or curriculum for what is needed to perform in your role. 

• Rebuild and revise your own curriculum over time 

• Recognize that other people will always be evaluating and grading you on their own rubric.

• Seek input from other data sources to inform your evaluation without enabling those sources to become judges or arbiters.

• Discount or ignore the input from other data sources.

• Conduct, periodically, a self-evaluation to assess your performance and identify the neglected or new areas that need your attention going forward.

• Keep your self-worth out of the evaluation process at all times. 

Special attention should be paid to this final point. No matter how much this startup leadership role seems like an inextricable part of you, your highest expression in the world, it is just a role. It is just the role you get to play right now at this point in your life. I’ve helped founders and leaders leave their companies. They left their roles after years of tying up their identity in those roles, and yet, on the other side, they still exist, they are people, they are fully human. 

When I point out to leaders how they are intermingling self-worth and role performance, they usually push back with arguments like: “but then I won’t be motivated! I won’t work as hard! I can’t just be lazy and coast! I know there are real problems I need to address!” 

That’s when I counter with “writing your own report card” as the evaluation alternative. Yes, of course, you should take an honest appraisal of your performance and ground it with data from others. Yes, of course, you need to identify weaknesses, problems, or gaps and address them. But you can do all that while leaving your worthiness intact. When you’re self-worth isn’t at stake, it becomes SO MUCH EASIER to hear any feedback (even unskillful over-the-net feedback) without feeling defensive. Leaders who have a solid sense of self-worth are more likely to ask for feedback because it’s not so threatening -- it’s just (potentially helpful) data.

Writing your own report card can be motivating, illuminating, and help you address problems without wasting the energy you might otherwise dedicate to self-flagellation or the fear that if you don’t achieve X you are somehow less worthy. I would argue it’s actually the more effective and efficient way to achieve your goals and perform at your very best. 

Putting It Into Practice

Ready to give it a try? Here are the tactical steps to reclaiming your own practice of self-evaluation and learning to write your own report card: 

1 - Articulate the expectations of your role - In what areas you do need to perform? Some of my clients do this by writing out their job descriptions. Others do this by extending the metaphor of “report card” to identify the “classes” they are taking for their role this quarter (“Hiring Chief of Staff 101”, “Preparing for Series B”, “Launching Feature XYZ”, “Strategic Planning for Next Year”, etc.) 

2 - Create some sort of rubric for how you will grade yourself, or decide what high performance looks like for each responsibility or each of your “classes”. 

3 - Check-in regularly with yourself on what you are trying, what you are learning, what progress you are making (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly).

4 - Take the time and space to evaluate yourself at regular intervals. Elicit data to inform your own evaluation. My clients who engage in this practice do their self-evaluation once every four months, but you could do it quarterly, bi-annually, or even monthly if things feel like they are shifting that quickly. 

5 - By this point, the company/team/product has likely changed and your role has changed with that. Go back to Step 1 -- make adjustments to your job description or start a new term with new “classes” and repeat the process.

This is what it means to have a robust evaluation practice for yourself. I encourage you to implement these steps to start, but to make this your own process as you go. Let me know how it goes and what you learn along the way!