✨ Lead Evaluation Guide

This document is intended to be a supporting document to help Core Contributors complete the 2023 Lightweight Evaluation Process.

This guide has been created to assist you in providing constructive and meaningful feedback to Core Contributors regarding their impact on Status. The evaluation will be structured in two parts. The first section will have specific questions about the Core Contributor’s contribution, collaboration and autonomy. Following that, there will be a short answer section that will give you an opportunity to provide more detailed feedback about the Core Contributors in the team you lead.

Writing Meaningful Feedback

There are two questions in the evaluation process designed to be more freeform qualitative questions to give you the opportunity to provide specific feedback to the core contributors in your team - these are:

  1. What is (at least) one thing the contributor does well?
  2. What is (at least) the one thing the contributor could improve on?

With these questions, we suggest.

  1. Provide clear and specific examples to support your feedback.
  2. Focus on addressing behaviors, not personality traits, for objective and action-oriented feedback
  3. Maintain a respectful and empathetic tone to ensure your contributors feel supported

There are a variety of frameworks and guides that are useful in helping write and deliver feedback. For more on giving feedback, please see here.

Additionally, here are examples of effective and ineffective feedback for the Core Contributors in your team:

😃 Effective: “Over the past year, the contributor has shown exceptional collaboration skills within our team. One particular instance to highlight was their collaboration skills during our recent project with Team X and Team Y. In this project, the contributor took the initiative to organize and lead discussions among the teams and consistently encouraged participation from others. The contributor helped to facilitate open conversations and create safe spaces for such collaboration which made a really positive impact on the project’s success. We were able to make better and more informed decisions as a result of this (for example, as a result, we decided to prioritise feature z) - the contributor played a significant role in making this happen.”

😔 Ineffective: “Excellent collaboration skills”.

Quantitative Assessment

It’s important to approach the quantitative section of this process with fairness and objectivity. The expectation is that not all of your Core Contributors in your team will receive an “Outstanding” rating. Instead, the aim is to offer honest and well-balanced feedback that reflects each Core Contributor’s actual performance. Keep in mind that most Core Contributors will likely receive a “Meets Expectations” rating. This will ensure that our evaluations are realistic and meaningful.

Rating Guide

The evaluation process requires you to provide a rating of the Core Contributors in your team - please use the guidance below:

  • Does Not Meet Expectations: Core Contributor consistently fails to meet role expectations.
  • Partially Meets Expectations: Core Contributor sometimes meets role expectations but has room for improvement
  • Meets Expectations: Core Contributor consistently meets expectations for their role - likely the majority of Core Contributors will fall into this category (it’s a good rating that demonstrates they are meeting our high expectations).
  • Exceeds Expectations: Core Contributor consistently goes above and beyond what is expected in their role
  • Outstanding: Core Contributor consistently has exceptional performance and contributions. Would expect this to be awarded to only a very small group of Core Contributors.

Distribution of ratings

Whilst there’s no forced distribution of ratings, it’s natural to expect (with 200+ core contributors) we’ll use the full scale of ratings. It is likely that most CCs will fall into the “meets expectations” category, but that we will also have some (a smaller amount) that are distributed in the higher, and lower, categories.

Please reach out to your People Ops Partner if you have any questions.