Monday, March 2, 2009

How has your manager rated you so far this year?

Strategy is invariably linked to execution.

World acclaimed CEO and author, Larry Bossidy, believes that poor business performance is often not the result of poor strategy. But from poor execution.

Peter Drucker is often credited with the quote "What gets measured, gets done". If you know exactly what is expected from you, exactly what needs to be done, exactly how it will be measured and what this means for your bonus, career prospects - and possibly job security - there is a pretty good chance you'll focus on it.

Sounds obvious. Yep. So is this what happens?

Well, given it is two months into the year. My question is - do you know exactly how your manager has rated your performance, so far, this year? And if you're a manager, do your team members know exactly how you have rated their performance? If they were asked today, could they confidently say exactly how their performance has been against defined objectives? And how their performance rates on the scale your company uses?

You should know. And so should they. It's not much use telling them at the end of the year that they've missed their objectives. It will be too late at that stage. Not fair to them. And your company may pay the price.

If you don't know - why is this? I think there are several reasons and will scribble these down for a later post.

What's your thoughts?

2 comments:

Nick McGivney said...

I've worked in agencies where results were nebulous at the best of times and very often your performance would be judged purely on social skills rather than success at what your job description actually was. I've seen good people come and go purely because they didn't fit in with the prevailing culture. I've experienced it first hand too. I'm not sure that nearly enough companies have that clearly defined structure. Personality very often gets in the way of clarity of requirements. Sometimes too it's hard to clearly delineate goals, of course, but in general terms I think you're right: managers ought to know how their charges perform against clear criteria. Employees deserve it too.

Paul Dervan said...

hi nick, thanks for input. it is possibly harder for marketing than other professions to establish clear goals. Just means we need to spend more time testing the measures to make sure they stack up.