Today is my quarterly review. I already know, almost word for word, what's in it.

👋 Hey Friends!

So today is my quarterly review, and here's a fact about me that I did not know was unusual until I started asking other people about their reviews and watched their faces do a specific thing, a kind of flinch, like I'd asked about a dentist appointment they'd been avoiding.

I already know what my manager is submiting.

Not "I have a general sense." I mean I could recite it.

My manager could recite it back.
We've both read it. at least twice.

Which apparently is not how this normally goes for most people, and once I understood that, I got a little obsessed with why.

Here's the unglamorous mechanic, because I think the mission-statement version of this ("communicate openly with your manager!") is where most advice like this goes to die.

I write my self-review alone first, before anyone else has seen a single word of it. Just me and a blank doc and the slightly uncomfortable task of describing my own quarter honestly, which is harder than it sounds, it turns out I am either way too hard on myself or accidentally writing a LinkedIn post, there is no in-between.

Then, before I submit anything, my manager and I sit down and go through it together. Line by line. Before, not after.

And here's the part that made people's faces do the flinch thing when I mentioned it: he does the same back to me. He doesn't submit his review of me either, not until we've been through it side by side. Neither draft moves until we've both seen it. Neither of us finds out what the other person actually thinks by opening a notification.

I want to be clear that this was not handed to me. Nobody's HR portal has a "trade drafts" checkbox. I had to ask for it, directly, slightly awkwardly, the way you ask for most things that turn out to matter. He said yes. That's really the whole origin story. I asked, and he was willing.

Here's what I keep noticing, the same instinct that makes me chase down customer feedback before it turns into a churn number is the instinct behind this. A surprise is never actually a surprise. It's just information that existed somewhere, sitting quietly, that nobody handed to the person who needed it in time to do anything about it. If the only way you find out how you're doing is by opening an envelope, that's not a feedback system. That's a waiting room with extra steps.

1. Start asking in your 1:1s, long before review season shows up.
The review is not the first checkpoint, it just feels like it because it's the loudest one. Every few weeks, ask your manager something specific: "Is there anything from this stretch that would surprise me if I saw it written down?" Watch what happens when you ask that out loud. Sometimes they hesitate, and the hesitation is the answer. Write down whatever they say either way. That's your raw material, collected months before you write a single line of your review.

2, Draft it yourself, honestly, before you've seen anyone else's version.
Write it like nobody's grading it yet, because at that point, nobody is. If you wait to see their draft first, you end up reacting to their version of your quarter instead of writing your own. Go first. Let your evidence set the frame before anyone else's does.

3. Ask for the trade. It will not be offered to you.
I have not met another person for whom this was standard practice by default. If you want to see your manager's draft before it's final, you have to ask for that exact thing, and "can we talk before the review" is not the same question as "can we trade drafts before either of us submits." Ask the second one.

4. Bring receipts, not adjectives.
"I was really proactive this quarter" means nothing to anyone, including you, six months from now. Name the project. Name the date. Name what happened because of it. And if their draft has an adjective doing all the work too, that's your moment to ask what it's actually based on, before it becomes a permanent record of your quarter.

5. When your versions don't match, that's the interesting part, not the scary part.
A mismatch between your draft and theirs isn't a verdict on who's right. It's a signal that one of you is missing information the other one has. Figure out which, before either version gets submitted as the official story.

Before your next review cycle even opens, ask your manager one question, out loud, this week: "Can we trade drafts before either of us submits?" If they say yes, you've just built yourself a preview system. If they say no, ask why, gently, genuinely curious. That answer will tell you more about the actual relationship than the review itself ever will.

I used to think a surprise in a review meant someone was sitting on a verdict, quietly, since March, waiting for the official form to make it real. Weirder truth: usually nobody's hiding anything. They just never wrote it down, so neither of us actually knew what we knew until it showed up in a doc with my name at the top of it, which, if you've ever had your whole quarter summarized in six bullet points, feels a little like reading a horoscope written by someone who was in the room the entire time.

So now I ask early. Not because I've gotten brave about feedback, my stomach still drops a little every time I bring it up. I ask early because a surprise saved for review season was never actually a surprise. It was just information somebody sat on, and sat-on information is the most expensive kind there is.

No surprises. That's it. That's the whole practice.

Have you ever actually asked to trade drafts before a review, or am I about to find out my manager is genuinely the best and i’m just a little nurotic.

Hit reply, I want to know if this is more normal than I think, or if I got lucky.

P.S. If you're staring down a review cycle with no idea how to even start the draft, that horoscope feeling is exactly the kind of thing I sit with people on in mt mentor sessions. Always happy to help write the draft together.