What Your Performance Review Actually Revealed About Your Value

Your performance review praised your teamwork, your reliability, your positive attitude. It mentioned several projects you completed successfully. You left feeling good about your standing.

Six months later, your position was eliminated.

Why this matters now:

Performance reviews document contributions, but not all contributions carry equal weight during budget decisions. What gets praised in reviews and what protects positions during cuts operate on different scales.

The goal is to separate feedback that reflects genuine organizational priority from feedback that reflects managerial courtesy. Most reviews contain both. You need to know which is which.

How to analyze what actually mattered:

Find your most recent performance review. Read it once without reacting. Then read it again looking for three specific patterns: what got measured, what got compared, and what connected to revenue or cost.

Measured contributions show up with numbers, timelines, or specific outcomes. "Improved team morale" is not measured. "Reduced average response time from 48 hours to 24 hours" is measured.

Compared contributions reference standards, benchmarks, or peer performance. "Handled projects effectively" is not compared. "Exceeded department average by 23%" is compared.

Revenue or cost connections link your work to money. "Managed client relationships" is not connected. "Retained three accounts that were considering competitors, representing $340K in annual contracts" is connected.

What leadership actually values:

Look at which contributions received the most specific language. Vague praise means the work was fine but forgettable. Detailed praise means someone paid attention.

Examples of specific language that signal value:

• Precise metrics about your impact on timelines, error rates, or output
• References to how your work affected other teams or departments
• Mentions of problems you prevented or caught before they escalated
• Comparisons showing you performed better than expected or better than peers
• Direct statements about how your work reduced costs or protected revenue

Examples of courtesy language that signal less value:

• General statements about attitude or work ethic
• Lists of tasks you completed without context about why they mattered
• Praise for being collaborative or communicative without specific instances
• Mentions of potential or growth areas phrased as encouragement
• Standard acknowledgment of meeting baseline expectations

The leadership attention test:

Performance reviews often contain one or two sentences that reveal what senior decision-makers actually noticed about your work. These sentences usually appear near the beginning or end, they reference organizational priorities, and they sound different from the rest of the document.

Find those sentences. If they discuss contributions that reduced risk, increased efficiency, or solved problems that had executive visibility, those contributions matter during budget discussions.

If your entire review focuses on competent execution of assigned tasks without connecting to broader organizational outcomes, you're valued for doing your job but not for being difficult to replace.

Common patterns in vulnerable reviews:

Certain review patterns correlate with positions that get eliminated despite positive feedback.

The "meets expectations" pattern: everything you do is adequate, nothing stands out as exceptional, no contributions created measurable organizational impact.

The "great teammate" pattern: praised for collaboration and attitude, minimal mention of individual contributions that moved organizational metrics.

The "growing into the role" pattern: positioned as developing rather than delivering, with emphasis on potential rather than demonstrated high-value results.

These patterns don't mean you're performing poorly. They mean your documented contributions don't create the kind of organizational dependency that protects positions during cuts.

What to do with this information:

If your review documented contributions that clearly mattered to leadership, identify whether those contributions are sustainable. Can you continue delivering similar results, or were they one-time projects?

If your review focused primarily on courtesy praise without specific high-value contributions, you need to build different work into your role before the next review cycle. This doesn't mean doing more work. It means doing work that connects more directly to what senior leadership monitors.

The documentation gap:

Sometimes you deliver high-value work that never appears in your performance review because you didn't surface it properly or because your manager didn't recognize its significance.

Compare what you know you accomplished against what got documented. If there's a gap, that's a communication problem. You need to ensure that work leadership would care about actually reaches leadership before decisions get made.

Next step:

Review your last performance feedback today. Identify which documented contributions actually connected to organizational priorities. Monday you'll start Week 4 of Financial Resilience examining your expense patterns. But first you need to know whether your current work is building security or just building activity.