As if the general news wasn’t enough to get you down, spring is often when the performance review process rears its ugly head in many corporations.  As a manager for six divisions at Eastman Kodak Company over the course of my 27-year career there, I can relate to this concern, but I also know it doesn’t have to be this way.  Why is it that so many people dread both writing and reviewing performance reviews? As a leader, you have it in your power to make this annual conversation one of recognition and encouragement or at least positive coaching and empowerment. 

Here are a Few Reasons Why Performance Reviews are Dreaded by Everyone Involved 

• Poor Training and Development – Promotions often occur because of great individual contribution followed by little training and development on how to be a good manager and supervisor. If you are in this situation, ask your HR department or the leader you report to for training and coaching in this area.
• Yes, But – Often you are told how you’ve performed through the year and then the conversation quickly segues to a yes, but of what you need to do to improve.  All the positive energy and good feeling you just created was just lost.  Guess what the employee will remember?  Avoid this problem, but separating performance review and performance planning into two different conversations.
• Poor Documentation Processes – It is really difficult to remember accurately the specifics and details of a person’s performance without good documentation throughout the year.  Avoid this problem by keeping an active folder for each employee.  This is simply a memory-jogger file for collecting specific performance notations that need to be included in the annual review.  Once the official review documents have been completed, purge this file and start a new active file for the coming year.  This is not an official performance file, but a place to keep your own notes so you more accurately provide details to the employee.
• Generalities - Not providing specific examples is a real downer for employees. Being told you did a good job or receiving coaching without specifics provides nothing to grow on.  Make sure you keep detailed notes in your active file mentioned above.
• No Surprises - All too often what an employee hears during the performance review is a surprise.  Nothing the employee hears during this discussion should be a surprise.  Any time something occurs throughout the year that deserves coaching and correction or praise and encouragement should be mentioned and reviewed at the time it occurs.

• Lack of clarity of expectations – Very frequently organizations have done a very poor job of establishing performance expectations.  When employees don’t have clarity about expectations for their job, it is almost impossible to contribute what the organization and supervisors are expecting, yet they will be receiving a performance review documenting what they did or did not do well.  No wonder they look upon performance reviews with trepidation. Avoid this morale buster and ensure everyone can contribute effectively by ensuring every position has well documented, shared, and thoroughly discussed performance expectations.
• Subjectivity – In the absence of objective standards and expectations, supervisors have no option but to write performance reviews subjectively.  By human nature, some subjectivity usually creeps into reviews, but favoritism and subjectivity can be minimized by writing performance reviews against well-established, openly-shared expectations for each position.

History is hard to overcome and many, many employees and supervisors have negative experiences relating to performance reviews.  As a leader, you have an obligation to simply not repeat history.  Examine what is the state of performance reviews in your organization and commit to making more positive memories for yourself and your employees.

Don’t Miss Out!

Strategic Planning for Entrepreneur’s, April 16 and 17, give me a call at 480 391 3861 for details.

 Keep up to date frequently by following my blog at http://joycefriel.blogspot.com

Do you have a data problem?  Don’t feel bad, most companies do.  It seems there is either too little data or you are swimming in meaningless mounds of data.  Maybe you have data but can’t access it, analyze it, or report on it easily.  If you want to improve your data you’ll undoubtedly be faced with the need to make a business case for data quality.  This can be tough to justify and unfortunately you will have to make choices about which problems to fix and which to leave for later.  In order to make the best decisions, you will need some tools to express the impact that poor quality data has on your company.  Here is a quick guide to help you get started. 

Begin by attempting to quantify the impact that a data quality issue could have on your business.  Consider both the area of the company that is affected by the data you are investigating and the number of users impacted.  Considering both dimensions will help you assess the severity of data quality impacts to your business.

1. Data that impacts legal and/or compliance reporting or management should be marked critical.
2. Financial reporting data, which should also be rated critical regardless of the number of users affected. Data that impacts your GL reporting always warrants a critical rating.
3. Operational data (used for daily management and reporting) is certainly important, but the severity of the impact can range from slight to critical depending on the number of users or business areas impacted. Consider the case when a few users are impacted and maybe their job is less efficient because of the issue, but the business does not grind to a halt. This would be rated a slight or possibly moderate impact.
4. Analytical data used for forecasting, modeling, scorecarding, etc. generally would have slight or moderate severity impact on your business. However, in the case where a large percentage of the users or quantity of data has been affected (say greater than 5%) the impact could be rated serious.

 By understanding the severity of the impact that data has on your organization, the areas affected, and the number of users impacted you will identify which data you can trust and which data need stronger controls and possibly clean up.

Turn off the news!
With all the doom and gloom in the news today, it would be easy to believe there is nothing positive coming out of our current global economic situation. I am not belittling those many very unfortunate situations in which people have been very adversely affected. However, I, for one, and many of my friends and clients believe now is the time to look for and create positive opportunities.

It is easy to get caught up in what you hear on CNN and the news stations. Turn it off! And get turned on to all the good things that are going on around you. Opportunity abounds, but only if you are looking for it and decide to take advantage of it.

Refocus in order to grow!
From whom and from where will the next breakthrough come? From you? From your company? Stranger things have happened. Rather than focusing on down sizing, cutting costs and laying off people, focus on what it would take to increase sales or launch that new opportunities which could grow your business rather than shrink it. Raising capital and increasing capacity rather than struggling to cut costs and reduce investments in your company and your people is not only exciting, it is a positive growth strategy rather than a declining negative approach.

Best of luck. Let me know the stories from your own experiences.

TIPSÓ – Touch Points, Ideas, Possibilities and Solutions

Please feel free to share these TIPS with your colleagues and friends.  If you wish to include any of this material in any of your own work or publications, please contact us for permission. Thank you.

The Best Don’t Need to Manage

We all are continually seeking to be the best at leading, managing, owning, development, etc.  Just note the huge sale of books such as Good to Great, Developing the Leader Within, The Leadership Challenge, Built to Last, and on and on and on.  While these books very effectively point out examples to follow and practices to emulate, there is just nothing quite as powerful as experiencing greatness first hand.  The case in point below demonstrates how ‘the best don’t manage’.

Over the years I have worked with hundreds of CEOs, Presidents, and owners some of whom were very effective and all genuinely and sincerely were trying their best.  Once in a while you come across someone who possesses a personal belief about the goodness in people and has a personal style that allows their belief to permeate through all they do. As a result those around them accept challenges beyond their expected horizon and truly blossom into a heightened level of their own potential.

I have a client who fits this description.

I’d like to share with you some of the traits that allow this person to maximize the best in others by very subtly ‘managing’ not only their own behaviors but all the activities of their company. Seldom do they have to overtly ‘manage’ people or processes, they surround themselves with people who have potential and then allow that potential to grow.  Here are some examples of what they do and how they do it. They realize

• The critical importance of hiring the right people – better to do without than hire the wrong person.
• That even it is difficult to do, sometimes you have to ‘de-hire’ a person who just doesn’t fit and never will.
• If an employee can’t be inspired, they made a mistake in hiring them and both the employee and the organization at-large will be better served the sooner this employee is gone.
• Employees really do know what they are doing, the key is to get out of their way and let them do it.
• Accountability and consequences (both positive and negative) must be used hand-in-hand for empowerment and human potential to grow.
• You must first trust before you get trust in return so they willingly give the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise.

While this client spends a lot of time thinking about and subtly positioning his own behavior and that of others in order to get the results that are needed, he does very little overt ‘managing’ of people and processes because the employees have willingly stepped up to the challenge.  His role is to set the direction, chart the course, keep the organization on task at a high level, ensure accountability is in place and provide liberal positive consequences for work well done.  As a result he seldom has to step into the more typical ‘manager’ role that is so typically stereotyped. He spends a lot of time listening, asking questions, helping, thinking and smiling.

I recently facilitated a senior leadership team work session for this organization.  And, while I didn’t actually keep track of the amount of time this person talked versus the air time of others in the session, I feel confident in saying he spoke less than 30% of the time.  He set the tone, stated the objectives, asked questions, gave affirming answers and confirmed decisions others were making.  This CEO is a delight to work with and I can only image how empowering, energizing, and engaging it is to work with him. 

 http://www.peakperformance.com

http://www.joycefriel.blogspot.com