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 [...]

Measuring Career Growth – Final (career phases framework)

This is the last article in the series on Measuring Career Growth, which started off by talking about measures of success and implication of having multiple measures vis-à-vis time, and was followed by posts on financial and learning goals, followed by a post on job complexity and satisfaction. As I promised in the last post, [...]

Measuring Career Growth – Part III (Job Complexity and Satisfaction)

This is the 3rd post in the series on measuring career growth, and a follow-up to the post on financial and learning goals. In this post, I will talk about 3rd goal (job complexity) and also touch upon the job satisfaction aspect of all these goals, which came up in one of the comments.
Job Complexity [...]

Measuring Career Growth (Financial and Learning goals) – Part II

This is the follow-up to my last post in which I talked about various measures of career success and the need to prioritize various goals so that trade-offs can be made when time is factored in. In this post, I will focus on two goals and their measures: financial and learning.
Financial Goals: Even though it [...]

Measuring Career Growth – Part I

In one of my previous articles, I talked about various measures of success that one can use for their career planning and management. Specifically, I talked about 4 ways:

Financial goals
Learning/competencies goals
Job complexity goals
Career Plan goals

Note that setting any kind of measurable goal is an exercise in itself (see a series of great posts on Cube [...]

Doing performance self-appraisal well

As I was completing the performance reviews for my team, I was reminded of the fact that so few people actually do a good job of appraising themselves. I have noticed this over the past 5-6 years that I am doing performance reviews and have gotten similar feedback from several other folks, and it hasn’t [...]

Mapping your career path

In my previous posts on managing one’s own career, I mentioned that a great way to measure your progress in career is tracking it against your desired career growth path. This is a great way because it provides us with the most direct way of mesuring the return on the time and talent investment we are [...]

Effective one on ones

In my experience in working with so many employees and helping grow some of the leads and managers, I have found that one-on-ones is a useful framework for all managers who wish to manage people well. I think this is the case because 1-1s impact some core tenets of being a good people manager:

Inform, Involve and Inspire the team

Foster [...]

Managing your Boss

Here are some of the questions/issues I  have seen employees directly/indirectly ask which relate to their managers as well as to how they fit in the organizational scheme of things:

I can’t talk to my manager, he is too rigid/aloof/scary.

I am stuck in my career, no growth. My manager isn’t sympethetic to my career development. 

I don’t know how [...]

Manager as a mentor/coach

Performance review cycles are coming in, and I have had a chance to review goals and tasks for many individuals while they are entered into our performance management (PM) system. Having gone through this exercise of using a PM product for almost 5 years now and reviewing hundreds of goals, it is clear that most good employees [...]