Later this year McGraw-Hill will be publishing the second edition of Perfect Phrases For Performance Reviews. It’s a bit of a departure from the first edition and the other books that we compete with, so I felt it was a good time to share the preface to the new book. I’d be interested in comments, since the book is not complete yet.
The Most Important Preface You Will Ever Read
I don’t know this guy. I do know that on April 1, 2009, (that IS April Fools Day) Tom Roche wrote what would have been a scathing review of my book, Perfect Phrases For Performance Reviews, if only he had actually read the book. I have to admit dismay and amusement at people who can’t even be bothered to read something they are reviewing., but truth is, that is the ONLY objection I have to Tom’s comments.
He’s right. The people who comment are correct. The title of his critique (with link) Continue reading
Fred Nichols has oft suggested that we scrap performance appraisals, while I contend that we need to teach people to use it intelligently. Here’s a bit from the ongoing conversation.
I think this is a great example showing that we have a tendency to look at performance appraisal issues through our own direct experience, which is bound to be somewhat limited. If we’ve had bad experiences we tend to believe that ya might as well get rid of the whole thing. And most people have had some bad experiences.
Since 1998 Robert Bacal has produced a wide variety of helpful books on performance management and performance appraisals. All are practically oriented. Here’s a look at books on the subject published by McGraw-Hill, and available at amazon.com You can browse, find free excerpts and make your discounted purchases by hovering and/or clicking on the books you are interested in.
Performance appraisals are probably the most misused, and goofed-up management tool in existence. Starting from misunderstanding the whole point of appraisals, right on through to use of poor communication with employees, managers make a fairly consistent set of mistakes about employee reviews , and performance appraisals. Here’s some of them in the fourth in our series of common managerial mistakes.
Since there are a fair number of errors made by managers in the performance appraisal and employee review process, we’ll approach this set in brief point form. Stay tuned since we’ll be dealing with a few more performance appraisal errors in a future article in this series. Until then here’s the first five.
A poster on trdev-l asked about how to handle performance evaluations when the company will not be offering pay raises due to the recession. Here’s my response
Good question. I know this has come up in other places. I think that if you have been stressing that the major reason for evaluations is to determine raises,then basically you are screwed, because both
managers and employees will balk, and the latter will almost certainly see evaluations as hypocritical and fake.
It’s scary. Just plain scary. A person who’s identity I have removed – a an HR person/trainers said about employee rankings and ratings:
On 11 May 2004 at 21:23, edllarena wrote:
On feedback upwards, appraisals to supervisors and supervisors:
I think we need to separate two different functions – one is judging (my manager does this or that well or badly), and providing critical information or feedback to help the manager do his or her job, and support the employee in getting their jobs done.
If we are talking about judging, then I suspect David is correct. If we are talking about getting information from employee to manager about how the manager can be more useful, then it’s a different story.