Performance Review – Weaving personal goals into organizational ones

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 by [...]

What do leaders/managers give to organizations?

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 [...]

Managing Careers

Here is the background on this series, and here is the previous post on this series (Managing Expectations).
This is the final post in the series, and this tackles perhaps the most important question of all: Ravi needs to help people in his team build and grow their career as they work under his guidance. However, [...]

Managing Expectations

Here is the background on this series, and here is the previous post on this series (Managing Work).
In this post, we are going to try answering the question: How does a manager as important as him (and holding as many resources) manage expectations from other senior managers and executives without over-committing his team or himself?
If [...]

Managing Work

Here is the background on this series, and here is the previous post on this series (Managing 1-1s).
In this post, we are going to try answering the question: While Ravi is the smartest guy and the leader in the team, he is also the bottleneck. How can he manage his work (delegation or empowerment for [...]

Managing 1-1s

Here is the background on this series, and here is the previous post on this series (Managing Performance). In this post, we are going to try answering the question: What is the most efficient way for someone to manage their 1-1s when one has many direct reports (in my friend’s case, 9).
Effective 1-1s is an [...]

Are you part of a dysfunctional team?

In the last post, I discussed the characteristics of a dysfunctional team, based on what the book talks about as well as based on my own experiences. In this post, I will present some of the lessons learned for me about how to identify the fact that you are part of a dysfunctional team. These [...]

Characteristics of dysfunctional teams

In my last post about characteristics of high-performance teams, I discussed the tenets of high-performance teams (as given by The Wisdom of Teams). In this post, I want to discuss the characteristics of a dysfunctional team, as defined by The five dysfunctions of a team, a fable about a dysfunctional leadership team, and compare and [...]

Is Annual Performance Review a waste of time?

Recently someone forwarded me this post about the fact that Performance reviews are a big fat waste of time. This is a long post talking about why it is so and proposes that we should just lose them. Here are the reasons the post mentions as to why this is the case:

Everybody hates them

They try [...]

Thoughts from my India Visit – Careers

As I mentioned in my previous post, I spent a month in India recently (August, 2008) before coming to Shanghai to join Microsoft here. I commented on the education system and related aspects that I observed. In this post, I will talk about my observations on working professionals and how careers are moving (or not). [...]