Your review may reflect your internal PR skills more than your work. This is how to respond, diagnose your company and rebuild trust.

A senior director of engineering came to me after receiving a bad performance review. He had received feedback that he wasn’t strategic enough, didn’t communicate at a high enough level and needed to learn to delegate. After years of getting great reviews, he felt blindsided.

During my career coaching executives managing thousands of direct and indirect reports, I’ve learned that a performance review isn’t necessarily a reflection of your performance but of your PR skills. And these days, your boss probably has less visibility into your work than ever. Gallup reports that, as of 2025, the average number of people reporting to a manager is roughly 12. Team sizes have grown nearly 50% since Gallup began measuring in 2013, when the average was just eight.

If you recently received a bad review, the steps you take next matter much more than the review itself.

Your first job during the review is to listen. It’s easy to become defensive when someone criticizes your work, but defensiveness can confirm the reviewer’s conclusions about you.

Instead, respond with a line like: “Thank you for sharing this feedback.” Since I coach a lot of tech clients who like numbers, I remind them that feedback is data. Your job is to decide how to turn that data into insights and action.

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