Swallow dissatisfaction with a smile

A busy life has the potential to generate dissatisfaction from family, social and work situations. As social bodies, we may tend to share this pain verbally, physically or emotionally with the group around us. Such spreading of pain could, at best, provide temporary relief through camaraderie. It is of prime importance for a manager to keep their team happy and upbeat, in order to get work done. This is even more important when we as managers are feeling down, because we need as much positive results as possible to lift us back up. By getting our team and others around us all upset, we will only bring more problems to us at a time when we are not in a position to resolve them. So, it is best for us to keep our problems to ourselves by swallowing it quickly...with a smile.

Effective Performance Review

Most often performance reviews are performed in the last minute with very little effort. Today, there are tools that will help you generate review documents, to ease this process. Unfortunately, missing out on an effective personnel review is a very big detriment to gettting things done.

To be a fair and diverse assessment, evaluations have be constant...throughout the year.

Here are some tips to for effective reviews:

• Establish clear, fair and reasonable goals and communicate them accurately.
  Our goal is to have every member of the team perform at 100%. So, we must clearly state what will get each member a 100%.
• Maintain a brief log of all the accomplishments and misses of your team members. Appreciate accomplishments and encourage solutions to address misses during periodic (weekly) meetings. Strive towards everyone getting a 100%.
• Listen constantly to what is being said and what is not being said. Take notes. This will provide insight into the strengths and aspirations of our team member.
• Keep track of external informal feedback about our team member that is always flowing in different forms.
• When the time comes for the semi-annual/annual assesment, always start with the team member strengths. Then, talk about the misses that have been previously discussed and solutioned. What worked and what did not. The more detailed the review, the more credible this process will be. Explain the rational for scoring. Discuss career plan/position options based on our observations and any team memeber expressed interests.

We must use performance reviews to reinforce that we really care about our team member. Once they know that we care, team member ownership and responsibility will automatically build up.