Domestic Partnership Performance Review, Parisian Style

Last week, my (lovely) wife made a joke about how a certain behaviour of mine would be noted on my performance review.
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Knowing she is an HR specialist, among other talents, I asked her to design an actual performance review for us to do. So she did! A few minutes later we were eating patisseries and doing our mutual year-end conjugal review.

The performance review is a bit of a funny concept to borrow from the employment world for a relationship that presumably:

  • Involves no explicit compensation
  • Is not going to end any time soon, and
  • Is non-hierarchical.

However, the key of the exercise — as Miriame presented it — is for the reviewer to:

  • Get clear about the expectations they have been holding all along,
  • Surface those expectations, and
  • Evaluate whether their needs have been met.

The reviewee then has an opportunity to:

  • Gain some self-awareness about their role in the relationship,
  • Decide if they want to commit to helping the reviewer met their needs, and
  • Negotiate on strategies to do that.

Warning: Not everyone is interested in these benefits!

I’ve often felt that the key to happiness is low expectations. If that’s where you’re at, then this exercise is happily irrelevant to you.

But for me, it was a light-hearted way to figure out how I wanted to do better next year (in the spirit of feed-forward as opposed to feed-back).
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Here’s the outline. Respond with questions if you have them and I’ll elaborate in a blog post if necessary.
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Step 1

Find a sweet cafe in Paris to sit down in. That really takes the edge off.

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Step 2

Take 5-10 minutes in silence to come up with a list of axes that you will use to “grade” the other person’s performance over the past year.
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Some of the axes we used were:

  • Patience
  • Kindness
  • House Cleaning / Yardwork
  • Dessert Preparation
  • Finances
  • Adventure

Each person is different.

One person’s axes might be very Business: timeliness, picking up the kids, cash money generation.

Another’s might be the % of days there was a kiss goodbye in the morning.

There’s no right answer to “What should I want out of life?” or “What do I need from my partner?”. As alluded to above, all such expectations are the root of disappointment and unhappiness.
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But we still have them, don’t we?
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Step 3

Once you have the axes, share them with the other party, explaining what you mean. This is the part where you clarify — for both parties — what your expectations were. You may not even have known it until this moment. That’s okay too.
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Step 4

Now the fun part begins. One person starts, and for each item on the list:

  • The reviewer says the name of the next axis.
  • The reviewee self-evaluates their performance for that axis.
  • The reviewee gives an example illustrating their self-evaluation.
  • The reviewer listens and gives sayback.
  • The reviewer then evaluates the reviewee, along the same axis.
  • The reviewer gives an examples illustrating their evaluation, just as the reviewee did.
  • General discussion and pastry eating.

Miriame also presented me with a scale that might be helpful. It goes from 1 to 4. We used the scale for the evaluation steps above.
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1 = Consistently not meeting expectations.

2 = Consistently heading towards expectations. Not there yet but the progress is palpable.

3 = Consistently meeting expectations.

4 = Consistently exceeding expectations.
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When one person is finished, the reviewer and reviewee switch roles and do it again. Obviously, Step 4, takes a while. Most of a date night dinner, perhaps?
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Step 5

The last part is Goals. What can we do differently (better?) to create a better experience of the relationship for everyone involved? The axes reviewed earlier can guide the structure of the discussion, or you can focus on just the scores where expectations remained unmet.