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Overview |
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Your
primary responsibility as a manager is to achieve results
through others. Motivating employees is an important component
of your managerial responsibilities, but it doesn't tell
the whole story. You must also manage their performance.
The benefits to be gained from effectively managing their
performance are tremendous: employees are your company's
most important assets.
Performance management is the ongoing process of working
with your direct reports in a partnership for the purpose
of helping them (and you!) to be successful. It's centered
on constant communication for the benefit of the organization
and the individual, and is an ongoing process punctuated
by formal periodic review sessions. Since the formal performance
appraisal can occur only about four times a year, and
is more commonly an annual event, it should be used in
combination with ongoing informal feedback. In this way,
nothing in the formal appraisal process will come as a
surprise to the employee.
These informal sessions provide an opportunity to discuss
performance in a routine manner. Problems can be discussed
before it is too late to fix them. In addition, your direct
reports - not to mention you, the manager - will become
comfortable participating in these discussions simply
because they are part of routine, frequently occurring
discussions.
The goal of performance management is to facilitate the
achievement of individual goals that ultimately impact
organizational and bottom-line objectives. Once you've
reviewed this section, you might want to go back and familiarize
yourself with your company's system for managing employee
performance. You'll find that the tools presented in this
section may be applied to any system, but it is important
that you consistently follow the policies and procedures
of your company's own performance management process.
For a new manager, the most difficult step in performance
management can be taking the first step: overcoming resistance
to what can feel like an overwhelming process. It becomes
a far more manageable process when it is shared with the
employee. In this case, the manager's responsibilities
are:
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Initiating
the conversations about the performance management
plan |
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Identifying
the most critical objectives |
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Ensuring
that responsibilities for work are fairly distributed |
The employee's responsibilities include:
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Clearly
understanding what is expected |
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Letting
you know when the objectives are unrealistic and
why |
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Establishing
his or her own specific objectives within the guidelines
established by the manager |
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Reflecting on and writing personal developmental
objectives |
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