So here we are, mid-October, and you know what that means? Performance review season is coming…or it may already be here for you.

I’ve been hearing it on every single coaching call in our Speak Like a Senior Leader program lately and inside our community there. People are starting to get self-appraisal forms landing in their inboxes. HR is sending out those cheerful reminders to about 360 feedback deadlines. For a lot of people, maybe even you, your review may be just around the corner. I know many of our clients have their review in December or early 2026. 

They are starting to think ahead NOW about how they want to approach it. Which is smart because performance reviews operate differently once you reach the mid and senior level. And here’s the thing, even if your review isn’t until the spring or summer – there’s always one right around the corner so if this doesn’t apply to you today..it may in the coming months because you’re always laying the groundwork for your next evaluation. But if you’re still approaching them like you did 10 years ago or when you were an individual contributor, then you’re leaving a lot of opportunity on the table and it will eventually come back to bite you. 

So, let’s break down five secrets — or really shifts from outdated ideas and approaches — that will make sure you make the most of this opportunity. Because you have a performance review at least once a year. Maybe twice, if your company does mid-year check-ins. Over a 20-year career, that’s 20 to 40 critical moments that determine whether you hear the words “we’re promoting you” or get assigned to that interesting client or account you’ve had your eye on.

Whether you get handed that bonus or salary bump that allows you and your family to take that vacation you’ve been wanting to.

Whether you finally get the headcount you’ve been requesting so you can stop drowning in work.

Or…

Whether you walk out with a nice pat on the back when your boss says “just keep doing what you’re doing” and a 3% cost-of-living adjustment that doesn’t even keep up with inflation.

But what worked fine when you were earlier in your career but will absolutely hold you back now. And the first of those secrets is that your review isn’t a report card. It’s a perception management and positioning session. 

You’ve got to stop treating your performance review like an HR formality or a report card. And I understand why this is so easy to do. You’re already under a crush of work, you have deadlines to meet, you’ve got YOUR team’s reviews to complete and your own review falls to the bottom of the priority list. So you tell yourself, “I’ll just wing it. I’ll pull something together the night before and hope I sound articulate.” It seems to work fine enough, right? 

You’re basically treating your review like a dentist appointment. Something you dread, put off, and then grin and bear your way through just so you can check the box  and say “great, thanks, good chat, see you next time” and get HR off your back. 

But what the most successful people realize is that your performance review IS NOT just a report card for the past six or twelve months. It’s not just about looking backward at what you DID. It’s also about the next 6-twelve months of how you’ll be perceived, positioned, and prioritized. 

Once you reach the mid or senior level, here’s what tends to happen: Your manager walks out of that conversation with you. Maybe a week later, maybe that same afternoon, they’re in a meeting with their boss. And the conversation turns to succession planning, or who’s ready for the next level, or who should get tapped for that new initiative or center of excellence. And your review becomes their talking points. 

Flash forward 3 months, maybe something comes up where work needs to be presented to the executive team. Or budgets are getting decided – once again, your review is the reference document. 

So when you wing it, when you show up unprepared and just hope you sound good? You’re handing your manager weak material to work with when they need to advocate for you. And as you climb the ranks, you NEED people saying your name and singing your praises in rooms you’re not in. At more senior levels, decisions about your career go beyond your direct boss. There may be committees involved or calibration sessions. So you better be sure, they’re talking about you in the way you want to be perceived and that your review is the foundation to show you’re the obvious choice. 

Secret #2 – Your Boss Doesn’t See Your Work Anymore—So You Have to Translate It for Them

When you’re seasoned or experienced in your role, then it’s likely you’re reporting to someone who is Director level or above themselves. By nature of that rank, they are more removed from the day to day work. Unlike earlier in your career, your boss now doesn’t see or maybe even know or understand what you’re doing every day. They may not even be a subject matter expert in the same area! They weren’t in the room when you had that delicate conversation that kept a key client from walking. They have no idea how you turned around that struggling project that was a total dumpster fire. You’re 1:1s with them are probably less than once a week – and if you report to a c suite exec, you’re lucky if you get a 30 minute site down twice a month. 

All of this is to say they often have limited context on you, your achievements, and where you want to go next. They are also insanely busy. They have 50 other things on their mind while they’re writing your appraisal or sitting debriefing with you. So you’ve got to make an impression that will stick with them. 

Practically, this means you can’t just show up and talk about what you did. You have to speak the language of business impact.

Your higher level leaders don’t care about task completion. They don’t want to hear, “I worked really hard” or “I put in so many hours” or even “I finished everything on time.” That’s table stakes. That’s expected. They’ll think… “good for you, that’s what we pay you for.” 

What they care about is outcomes and results.

Did you drive revenue growth? Did you reduce risk? Did you streamline something in a way that freed up budget or resources? Did you build something – a process, a team capability, a system or tool — that’s going to keep paying off in the months ahead? 

This is something we spend a ton of time on in Speak Like a Senior Leader, because it feels daunting to figure out how you do this translation without overblowing what you accomplished. And the good news is there are only THREE forces of business impact that everything comes back to. That helps shortcut and simplify so much, when you know there’s just a few formulas everything maps back to. So once you really hone this skill of translating your activities and tasks to those outcomes, THATS when you’re taken more seriously. 

Because at the mid and senior levels, your evaluator is asking themselves, consciously or not – “Is this person ready to sit in my seat?” They want to be able to see from the way you’re articulating your wins, your growth areas, your goals that you’re thinking about the bigger picture, beyond your personal projects, beyond YOUR dept.  You need to demonstrate that you’re thinking like an executive, like them, —even if you’re not one yet. And if all you’re giving them is a list of things you checked off and completed, the answer is no. But if you’re speaking their language—That’s when they think “oh.. This person knows how to rally and mobilize people. They know how to handle complexity. They know what keeps ME up at night and are trying to be partner in solving that. They get it.” 

Speaking of rallying and mobilizing others, that brings me to Secret #3 – which is to avoid overindexing on team spirit and collaboration. 

Now, at your level, most of your wins and successes happen THROUGH other people. Just like your boss, you’re not always the one in the weeds anymore. You’re not the one personally closing the deals, building the models, writing the code, running the analysis. You’re leading or coordinating the people who are doing those things. Which creates this really delicate balance.

You need to claim credit for what your team accomplished without cutting them out and making it sound like you did everything yourself. But you also can’t deflect so much that YOUR contributions just fade into the background.

I see people mess this up all the time. Especially the clients in our programs and listeners of this show, they consider themselves to be servant leaders. And I love that about them – they care about their people, they prioritize their development, they give others credit. But sometimes that can go too far. 

You walk into that review and it’s all “my team did this, my team accomplished that, my team really showed up.” When you’re asked about your biggest accomplishment, you mention that great initiative you pushed through immediately followed by “but it wasn’t just me” or “it was a team effort.” Both of those are seemingly harmless, little 5-word phrases that can destroy your credibility. You’re so concerned about appearing humble and generous, but your reviewer is left wondering what value YOU actually added. If it was all the team, then what exactly did YOU do… and what are they paying you for? 

There’s a way to give your team credit AND make your crystal clear. It’s a both/and not an either/or. 

Your team didn’t just magically accomplish great things in a vacuum. Someone had to set the vision. Someone had to secure the resources. Someone had to remove the roadblocks. Someone had to make the tough calls when priorities conflicted. Someone had to step in when the client was upset. Someone had to coach that struggling team member through their rough patch. Someone had to navigate the politics when another department was being territorial. Someone had to make the case to the board about why this work mattered.

That someone was you.

So instead of saying “the team launched this new product,” you need to be able to articulate what YOU specifically did to make that happen. Maybe you identified the market. Maybe you built the business case that got it funded. Maybe you restructured the org chart to have the right people in the right seats. Maybe you negotiated with three different departments to get the pilot off the ground.

And you can absolutely talk about that while still honoring your team’s execution. So if you find yourself constantly deflecting credit, ask yourself: How did my efforts make it possible for the right work to happen? What would have been different—or what wouldn’t have happened at all—if I hadn’t been in this role? THAT’S what belongs in your performance review.

Secret #4: Vague Feedback Isn’t a Red Flag—It’s Can Be a Sign You’re on the Right Track

We’ve been talking about how at the mid and senior level, you need to be highlighting different skills. Things like influence, stakeholder management, strategic thinking. It’s more… intangible.

And I bet, you also get intangible, maybe even ambiguous feedback in return about the areas you need to improve. You’re told “You need to work on your executive presence. Maybe it’s “I want you to be more visible with senior leadership. Or the classic: “You need to show up with more confidence.”

And you’re sitting there thinking… What am I supposed to do with that? It feels vague, unhelpful, maybe even a little unfair. Like, “Can you just tell me specifically what I’m doing wrong so I can fix it?”

It can feel like a jarring transition, because when you were earlier in your career, feedback was probably more concrete. “You need to respond to emails faster.” “Your presentations need more data.” Clear problem, clear solution.

And for those of us who want to be the gold star students, to do everything right. We think, just give my marching orders and I’ll execute them. 

But this vague feedback CAN be a sign you’re heading in the right direction. Let me explain.

If they’re telling you they want you to be more decisive and assertive, that means they trust your judgment. They wouldn’t be asking you to use your judgment more if they didn’t believe in the direction you’ve taken things in the past. What they’re really saying is, “Stop asking for permission. You already know what to do—just do it.”

If they’re saying they want to hear from you more, or they want you to be more vocal, that means they want more of you. They think you have valuable insights and they’re not getting enough of them. That’s not criticism—that’s an invitation. 

If the feedback is about visibility or presence, they’re signaling that they see potential in you at the next level. They wouldn’t be coaching you on how you show up with more powerful people if they didn’t think you belonged in those rooms.

So before you spiral into self doubt or annoyance about the “development areas” you get on your review, just realize, this isn’t them telling you you’re failing. This is them telling you you’re close.

Also, once you reach mid and senior leadership, by the very nature of those levels, you’re being judged less on hard skills now and more on soft skills. If you think about the executives at the very top of your organization, what separates the great ones from the okay ones? It’s not technical skill. Often not even their intelligence. It’s things like gravitas, political savvy, the ability to read a room, knowing when to push and when to let something go. Success is way more about the intangibles – how you build relationships, how you make people feel when they work with you. How you show up under pressure. 

So the feedback gets squishier. Because your reviewer is trying to describe something that’s hard to describe. They’re trying to guide you on things that don’t have a clear rubric or they may have never clearly defined for themselves. It’s not necessarily fair, but it is reality. 

The trick is to not just accept the ambiguity at face value. You have to gently dig deeper. Two quick ways to do that: 

First, use binaries. Give them two clear options and ask them to choose.

So if they say if they say “improve your executive presence,” you ask, “Got it. Is this more about how I’m communicating—like I should be more concise or more confident in my delivery? Or is it more about the substance of what I’m saying, like I need to be connecting my work to broader business goals?”

See what you’re doing there? You’re not making them come up with the answer from scratch. You’re giving them two concrete options and asking them to choose, which is so much easier for them to respond to. 

The second technique is to ask them to tell you about a time they saw this done well, or a person who does this effectively. So if they say “you need to build more influence,” you say, “That makes sense. Can you think of a situation recently where someone did that well? Or is there someone in the organization you think does this really well that I could learn from?”

Now they’re not just giving you abstract advice. They’re pointing you to a real example you can study and learn from. Or you can ask them to describe a specific moment where they wish you’d shown up differently. “Can you think of a recent meeting or situation where you would have liked to see me handle things differently? What would that have looked like?”

Last but definitely not least, Secret #5 – Frame Your Development Areas as Preparation for the next level, Not personal failures

Secret #5: Stop Framing Your Development Areas Like Personal Failures

Let me show you what I mean. When you’re writing your self appraisal for your performance review, I bet your immediately go into self critical mode: 

“I really struggle with public speaking.”

“I know I need to work on my time management.”

“I tend to get too in the weeds.”

You’re confessing weaknesses. You’re listing off problems. You’re basically handing them a list of reasons why you might not be ready for more responsibility. 

And look, I get why we do this. You’re trying to be self-aware. You’re trying to show that you’re honest and reflective and willing to grow. Those are all good instincts. 

But I want you to shift this framing juuust slightly. Instead of presenting them as issues that need fixing (which can inadvertently suggest you might be struggling to keep up or excel where you are), you want to present your areas for growth as  building capacity for bigger challenges.

Just think about it from their perspective for a second.

If you say, “I really struggle with delegating,” what they hear is: “This person can’t let go of work, which means they’re probably a bottleneck, and I’m worried about whether they can actually scale as a leader.”

But if you say, “As I’m thinking about the next level, I want to get even better at delegating the high-impact work, not just the day-to-day tasks, so I can focus more on planning and positioning the team for what’s ahead,” what they hear is: “This person is thinking ahead. They’re already preparing themselves for bigger responsibilities.”

The difference is intent. One sounds like a liability. The other sounds like someone who is stepping up. Are you developing this skill because you’re falling short of expectations right now? Or are you developing it because you’re preparing for what comes next?

Let me give you a few more examples so you can really see the contrast.

Instead of: “I need to get better at conflict.” Try: “I want to continue developing my ability to navigate high-stakes disagreements and drive alignment when there are competing priorities.”

Instead of: “I’m bad at saying no.” Try: “As my scope increases, I’m focused on getting better at prioritizing ruthlessly so I can protect my team’s capacity for the work that matters most.”

And I want to be really clear here—I’m not saying you should lie or pretend you don’t have real areas where you need to grow. Of course you do. We all do. That’s not the point. The point is that growth is inevitable at every stage of your career. The question is, what story are you telling about why you’re growing? 

Alright, we’ve covered five critical secrets for navigating performance reviews once you hit the mid and senior levels. Let me recap them quickly:

Secret #1: Your review isn’t a report card—it’s a positioning session. 

Secret #2: You’re no longer being evaluated by someone who sees your work. Your boss has limited context, so you need to translate your accomplishments into the language of business impact.

Secret #3: Avoid overindexing on team spirit and collaboration. Yes, your wins happen through others now, but you can’t deflect so much credit that your own contributions become invisible.

Secret #4: Vague feedback isn’t a red flag—it’s actually a sign you’re on the right track. At this level, you’re being judged on intangibles, so dig deeper and get the clarity you need.

Secret #5: Stop framing your development areas like personal failures. Position them as preparation for what’s next, not problems you’re trying to fix.

You’re busting your butt every single day. You’re the reliable workhorse of your department. You deserve more than the bare minimum. And you deserve better than that gut-punch moment when you were fully expecting “exceeds expectations” because you’ve been going above and beyond all year, and instead you get slapped with “meets expectations” that then keeps you up at night for weeks, making you question everything. 

The five shifts we talked about today can help you walk into your review with confidence and walk out with the recognition and rewards you deserve.

But here’s one last thing I need to mention, and this is important.

You should never be walking into your performance review nervous about the rating you’re going to get.

Your review shouldn’t be this high-stakes moment where you’re crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. It should feel like a conversation that’s confirming what you already know—because you’ve been shaping perception every single day.

And that’s exactly what we teach inside Speak Like a Senior Leader.

We’re not just giving you tips for your annual review. We’re showing you—with hands-on coaching—how to position yourself, build your reputation, and demonstrate executive-level impact in every interaction, every meeting, every conversation you have.

We would love to see you inside the program, especially since right n from October 20th through the 24th, you have one last chance to join at the 2025 introductory pricing before it goes up for good. You lock in your spot for the January cohort at the lower rate. You also get four months of bonus access to my Coaching Tools Library, which is packed resources you can use right away. And you get the Performance Review Playbook masterclass, which walks you through a 8 often-overlooked locations to uncover big wins you may have missed, aGenius way to spoon-feed your manager exactly what you want them to say in your performance review … and have them thank you for it! And lots more.

So just head to speaklikeaseniorleader.com or the link in the show notes. 

That’s all for today. See you on the next episode.