A Bad Performance Review Isn’t Always About Your Performance. Here’s How to Recover.

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.

1. Listen before you respond

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.

You can listen without agreeing with everything in the review. You can request time to return with examples that ensure your manager sees your full contributions. This might sound something like, “I plan to get back to you next week with my response to the review.” There’s a big difference between arguing with a review in the moment and presenting evidence a week later.

2. Diagnose your company’s review culture

Before you decide on a response strategy, you need to know what kind of company you’re working at. I’ve seen firsthand that some companies truly invest in developing leaders after a bad review, while others issue a bad review as a formal notice that they’re going to fire you.

How do you tell the difference? Reflect on what happened to the last few people who received bad reviews. You can also ask your HR business partner directly whether there’s a realistic path to the other side of this review. It sounds obvious, but HR will often tell you the truth. If you have a peer you trust, you can also disclose your concerns to them and compare notes. Your boss’s nonverbal signals during the conversation will give you information as well. Together, this data will tell you whether to invest in rebuilding or start planning your exit.

When the senior director I’m working with probed further, he learned that his company regularly gave tough reviews but didn’t always fire people afterward. Instead, the people he talked to said leadership was truly invested in development. Learning this informed our strategy.

3. Launch an internal PR campaign

With the senior director, we first had to understand why executives saw him this way. It turned out that he had been at the company for more than a decade and had been promoted several times, so executives still saw the engineering manager he used to be rather than the senior director he had become. This pattern is common among leaders who have grown their scope, including a client I’m currently coaching who is navigating the tension of becoming his former peers’ boss.

Part of the fix was how he showed up. Another part was how executives perceived him. Because of this, we ran what I call an internal PR campaign. Every three to four weeks, we identified one thing he had achieved and discussed a way to publicize his progress to his boss, his boss’s boss and the C-suite. Promoting himself felt unnatural given his technical background, so we practiced small steps first, like sharing updates in Microsoft Teams and via email. For example, he broadcast to his colleagues that his team had identified major bugs leading up to a major software launch. In the past, he would have just assumed that everyone would notice.

Truthfully, most clients resist this kind of promotional campaign at first. It can feel like bragging, and they believe their work will speak for itself. But in my experience, it rarely does. Imagine your boss has seven direct reports, and each of them has seven of their own. That makes you just one of 49 voices competing for the attention of a leader whose attention resources are limited. A lack of internal visibility is also a big reason high performers get passed over for promotions.

Six months later, at his next review, he received an “exceeds expectations” rating. He was also tapped to lead a special project in another country that was a high priority for the CEO, all because he had rebuilt trust at every level, from his boss to the senior executive team.

4. Read the writing on the wall

Sometimes a bad review means the company has already made up its mind. I worked with a C-suite executive at a company with a track record of laying people off shortly after giving them bad performance reviews. Unlike the senior director, he didn’t feel like he could turn around this perception before the company acted.

He decided to launch a stealth job search. Simultaneously, he made sure his work was airtight, assuming his boss was looking for any reason to terminate him. This required working harder than ever while applying for positions and interviewing on the side. He landed a new role in four months, ahead of his next review, when he believed the company would move to terminate him.

(If you have repeated experiences like this across companies, it may point to a deeper question about whether you keep landing in the wrong leadership roles.)

Final thoughts on recovering from a bad performance review

You can recover from a bad review, and better yet, often prevent one. Your goal is to make sure you’re never surprised again. While it’s your boss’s job to provide you with feedback, it’s also your job to seek it out. I encourage clients to ask for feedback often, and to ask more than once. Clarifying that you want critical feedback, not just praise, is what makes the habit work. When you build regular feedback into your approach, the formal review tends to become a recap of conversations you’ve already had. You’ve got this!