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Prepare for performance review 1-1s

| Mrityunjay Kumar

Introduction

Performance review time is one of the most stressful period in an organization, both for the employees and for their managers. Given the fact that most managers don’t provide performance feedback during the year and wait for the performance review season to do so, it becomes the time for surprises, brickbats, and distress. The crucial 1-1 conversation between employee and their manager becomes the most important conversation of the year which determines many aspects of the career. So it is important for everyone (employee and manager) to be ready.

Employee Readiness

A performance review 1-1 is effective for an employee if he achieves following goals:

  • Performance rating aligned with expectation
  • Bonus and Salary raise aligned with performance
  • Specific feedback on areas of improvement

CareerBloom helps you prepare a good case for your performance that you can write in self-appraisal as well as use in your 1-1. We can also prepare you to ask right questions to gather right amount of details from your manager about areas of improvement so that you can achieve your career goals next performance review cycle.

Manager Readiness

A performance review 1-1 is effective for a manager if he achieves following goals:

  • Address employee’s needs and expectation from performance review
  • Clearly communicate the rationale behind the performance rating
  • Provide specific feedback on areas of improvement

CareerBloom helps you get ready for typical questions from an employee by offering coaching on how best to handle it, given your organizational context. We also help you craft your communication plan around the performance rating and performance improvement areas.

Career Coaching

| Mrityunjay Kumar

Introduction

Career coaching doesn’t need to be only for C-level executives, CareerBloom makes high-quality coaching accessible to all working professionals. If you are a working professional, now you have a real chance to actualize your talent potential and be extremely successful in your career.

Career Coaching Philosophy

CareerBloom offers career coaching to working professionals and help them discover their career goals, plan their career journey, and be effective at workplace, thereby achieving long term career success. We offer issue-based tactical coaching as well as proactive and strategic coaching to prepare the ground for future career success.
A successful and long-lasting career requires 3 ingredients:

  1. Self-awareness and awareness of goals
  2. A high level plan for career path and a list of career milestones
  3. Effective execution of career plan – moving fast and in the right direction (what we call ‘Career Velocity’) at workplace

At CareerBloom, we call these Discover, Plan and Work phases.

Discover

  • Interests and Passion
  • Strengths and Weaknesses
  • Life and Career Goals

Plan

  • Career Path and Milestones
  • Learning Goals
  • Career Success Metrics

Work

  • Workplace Issues Resolution
  • Effective and Efficient
  • Jobs and Roles Upgrade

Our offerings focus on each of these phases. Review our services offering and pick the service that works best for you.

Job Change Strategies

| Mrityunjay Kumar

I want to change jobs, but I am unable to get right offers

Changing jobs is one of the few times when we spend quality time thinking about our career. Unfortunately, most of this time is spent in tactically looking for a job, rather than strategizing about career and job. This results in a sub-optimal job search, and you end up with no or very small number of offers, and none of them seem right for you.

Strategic Job Search

The solution is to search for the job in the right way. There are many ways, one of the ways we have seen work well in our experience relies on COAST framework. It consists of following steps:

  • Conception: Identify the need for a change and making sure right goals exist for making change. Clarity of these career goals are essential to be successful at getting right job offers.
  • Organization: This phase is about doing research about roles, companies, hiring managers, domain, etc. so that you know the right roles and companies to target. This is also about preparing yourself, including your resumes, interviewing skills, your online presence (LinkedIn for example), etc.
  • Application: Application phase is all about how to do your best in interviewing, how you learn from failures to do better at next set of interviews, and do all you can to get an offer from the companies you want.
  • Selection: This phase is about picking the right offer so that you don’t have to come back in the job market soon.
  • Transition: This phase is about doing the transition successfully, so that you can quickly establish yourself on a career growth trajectory which was the goal of this job change.

There are many other strategies to go about doing a job search, important thing is to pick something and stick to it.

 

Managing Career Proactively

| Mrityunjay Kumar

I feel my career is going nowhere and my peers are growing fast.

This is not a comment you hear from people many times, but most people have it in their mind.

Career Hopelessness

There are many reasons why someone may feel this way. Here are some reasons we have seen in the past:

  1. Performance Review – Your performance review (and associated raise) hasn’t been great for last few times.
  2. Boring projects – You have been working on projects which doesn’t challenge you enough and you feel bored.
  3. Lack of passion – You are not passionate about the industry/domain/role that you work in
  4. Lack of perspective – You only look at the star performers around you
  5. Goal Clarity – You are not sure what you want to achieve in your career.

Resolution – Career and Goal Review

When you are faced with this situation, following these steps:

  1. Review goals and milestones – Slow down and take stock of your career. The first thing you should do is to spend some time in rediscovering your career goals and milestones and make sure you understand your them and are working towards them.
  2. Evaluate Career Trajectory – In the hectic pace at workplace, sometimes, without our realization, our career trajectory deviates from our career goals. Many times, this happens when you keep doing what the company and your manager ask you to do, without thinking much about what you want to do.
  3. Identify alignment issues – When you spend time analyzing your career trajectory and career goals, you can identify lack of alignment between the two. In this case, you need to work with your manager to see if you can align your career goals with organizational goals. Most of the time, if you have a good manager, it is possible to do so.
  4. Fix alignment issues – You can fix many alignment issues by changing your project with the help of your manager. In the cases where it is not possible, it may be time for a bigger change – in role, company, or even domain. It depends on source and extent of mis-alignment.