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Many of you would have had your performance review 1-1 recently, and most likely you are disappointed about how it went. There are many reasons why you would be disappointed right now, I talked about it in my post last year about this - Performance Review - The Day After. If you want to … Continue reading What do you focus on – activities or results?
In my last post on when organizations care about careers, I talked about various things an organization can do in order to utilize their employees effectively and in the process, help employees realize their career goals. However, not all companies care about careers, and when they don't, individuals suffer. It is essential for everyone to … Continue reading Why do we work – When individuals care about careers
In my previous post on 'Why do we work', I talked about 4 levels of employees from the perspective of career and motivational stages: Entry Level Employees, Senior employees/frontline managers, Middle Managers, and executives. They differ in terms of how they manage their career and what motivates them to give their best to the organization. … Continue reading Why do we work – career stages and attributes
This post is a part of the series of posts I am doing on Being Effective at workplace. Taking initiative is about picking up organizational challenges to solve without being asked and delivering results. Taking initiative is a well-known way to achieve stardom at workplace. A FastCompany article has this to say from the book … Continue reading Being Effective at workplace – Taking Initiatives
Effective 1-1 is the cornerstone of a successful management career, and acquiring necessary competencies in order to have a great 1-1 with your reports is a great career enhancement technique. I have referred to this topic many times in my posts and have couple of posts devoted to this topic (see Managing 1-1s and Effective … Continue reading Effective 1-1s – Fostering trust and creating no-harm zone
Everyone I have met at workplace wants to make sure they are being evaluated fairly and are given right indications about the result of their evaluations. Most of the time, they rely on the process of evaluation that organization has put in place: manager feedback, acceptance and respect among peers, performance evaluation process, etc. The … Continue reading How do you evaluate your performance?
One of the persons reporting to me mentioned he has bad memory and so he cannot quickly respond to out-of-context questions. He further inferred from this that this weakness will stop him from doing his job effectively. After more discussion, it was clear to me (though I leave this decision to the person himself) that … Continue reading Personality Style or Weakness – you are the judge
Recently I attended a training which highlighted some of the differences between team and workgroups. The discussion started with the team definition. The definition used was the one from 'Wisdom of Teams' book: A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach … Continue reading High-performance teams – Do they need leaders?
Often times, setting goals for next year's performance review takes into account only organizational goals set by the manager for the employee. This misses an opportunity to set the goals in a way that could benefit the employee's career growth plan in the most direct way. As an employee, you should look at goals set … Continue reading Performance Review – Weaving personal goals into organizational ones
This is performance review time, and naturally I am thinking about what I have done over the past year as a leader/manager to warrant any reward. It is always hard to figure this out, because all the work is done by an Individual Contributor, and so it is hard to be objective when evaluating the … Continue reading What do leaders/managers give to organizations?
Career Bloom 