Since the theme of the month is Performance management, thought I’d share a video from The Harvard Business Review Channel. This particular video, The Path To Peak Performance, offers an interesting perspective getting the most for your employees – not just the high achievers, but your average and under achievers.
Key message … it’s not just about connecting the right people to the right tasks, but making an emotional connection to their work. Check it out!
QUESTION: What do you do to facilitate and encourage an emotional connection between what your employees work on and the value that work they provide?
Having clearly defined goals to measure employee performance against, is the cornerstone of best practices performance management. In this post, we cover the basics of helping coach employees set goals. Effective employee goal setting ensures everyone is working in the right direction, and your workforce is performing at the highest levels possible.
Part of a “no surprises” performance management process begins with clear expectations between you and your employees. There’s no better starting point than having well defined job descriptions. They are not particularly hard to put together, but they do require some forethought.
Job descriptions generally answer the question of, “What am I hiring this person to do?”
Key Elements of a Clear Job Description
Clear job descriptions should include the following elements:
Job title
Organization name
Position the job reports to (e.g. Support Director, Sales Manager, etc.)
Outline of general areas of responsibility and associated subtasks (which should align to organizational goals)
List of competencies and skills required to do the job Read more…
Until I spent time thinking (and reading) more about Performance Management, it occurred to me, I need to first answer the question – “Why is managing performance so important?”
After doing the research and thinking back to my own experiences of coaching (and being coached), I have a renewed appreciation for managing performance and why it’s a critical habit for successful management.
According to a study by The Aberdeen Group, there are several factors behind the need to manage performance:
The need to improve company performance
The need to improve employee productivity
The concern of attracting and retaining “top talent” by failing to develop employees
Sure, it’s easy to understand the first two from an employer perspective. However, attracting and retaining “top talent” is of particular concern of managers for a variety of reasons: Read more…
One of the reasons I started this blog was to learn and write on the habits of successful management practices.
From time to time, I will pick a topic critical to successful management. I will create a series to share what I’ve learned, identify key resources, highlight insightful articles, and share my own thoughts to help you establish your own habits for better management.
In this series, I’m focusing on Performance Management. Managing talent is one of the most difficult, time consuming and under developed skills for managers. Even though performance management should be a year-round process, most companies and managers only pay attention to this once a year (during the annual review period).
This blog post will serve as the landing page for all of the posts in the Performance Management series. This list will continue to expand and change as I create the content. Read more…
There I was standing toe-to-toe, eye-to-eye, mano-a-mano with one I my most difficult challenges - my three year old son. My blood pressure was rising – I’d had enough..E-N-O-U-G-H!! He was supposed to be in his room taking a nap! It was humbling experience, as I was suppose to be “large and in charge.” Yet I was clearly not in control. I took this episode as a learning moment and wondered what my kids could teach me about managing others.
I’m sure there are many lessons here, but I came up with my top five: Read more…
As a manager, I have often found a need for an effective tool to help me identify:
organizational strength and weakness areas
organizational training needs
individual development areas
organizational and individual flight risk patterns
Over time, I developed a simple excel Skills Matrix Scoring Spreadsheet that provides valuable “at a glance” information to help me ensure I’m managing my team to success.
