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 Performance

See my previous post for background on this series of posts. The question we are attempting to answer is: How does someone (in this case, my friend Ravi who has 9 direct reports) set performance objectives for teams and individuals so that he does not have to spend too much time directing day-to-day activities?
There are [...]

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 [...]

Characteristics of High-performance Teams

In this post, I would like to discuss about characteristics of high-performance teams as defined in The Wisdom of Teams. For more detailed review of the book that I wrote sometime back, see here: Part-I, Part-II and Part-III.
The book defines a team as follows (my formatting)
A small number of people with complementary skills who are [...]

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 [...]

Performance Measurement – Team or individual?

Among many advantages of agile development is the one which produces efficiency by squeezing away the cost of interaction between various members (roles) of a development team (for example, QA doesn’t need to raise the bug and wait for it to be fixed and then verify it, he/she can walk up to the dev and [...]