Performance Criteria Explained

Performance Management is a tough task to manage. Providing right feedback so that individuals understand in a proper context is hardest thing to do. Individuals will be emotional about their performance. When everyone does their best, an attempt to rate them always looks unfair.

In recent times, my thoughts were focused on how can we make it easy for someone to understand their own pperformance.

I have come up with a metaphor to make it easy for individuals to evaluate their pperformance.

Imagine tasks individuals need to performance on job as pebbles, bricks and rocks.

Pebbles: These are routine and small tasks. Every job has a bunch of them. You need to do them regularly.

Bricks: These are projects that you are responsible for.

Rocks: These are tasks, projects that involve significant effort. You cannot tackles them in one shot. You need persistence, effort to tackle them.

Now to benchmark and measure performance of an individual, ask the individual to identify as one of the following

Kid: A new employee in the organization
Normal Adult: An employee with good amount of experience.
Well Built Adult: Very experienced employee
Body Builder: Highly experienced employee

If you leave any of the above individual for an hour and instruct them to move as many Pebbles, Bricks or Rocks they can move, it is common sense to understand how they performed.

There are a variety of outcomes that can happen in one hour. Following are a few examples and how you can interpret the performance

Kid:
- Moves lot of pebbles: Normal erformance
- Moves a few pebbles, one or two bricks: Good Performance
- Moves no pebbles, attempts to move bricks: Below Normal Performance as failed to perform routine tasks.
- Moves no pebbles, no bricks and is trying to push the rock: Below Normal Performance as he seems to be focused on wrong things.
- Nothing Moves: Does not know what to do (wrong person, wrong job)

In a similar way, you can extend this common sense approach to understand an individual’s performance and let individuals identify what pebbles, bricks and rocks they moved.

If you are an employee, will the above approach make it easy to understand performance criteria?

If you are a manager, will the above appraoch make it easy for you to put employee performance in a proper perspective?

Share your thoughts.

Time management – Career Growth

While talking to colleagues and friends, I was trying to convey importance of time management in career growth. Unless one can focus on their time management skills, ability succeed when we get higher responsibilities will not be easy. I decided to document how various factors change when one is progressing in their career.

I have written this in a table format so that it becomes easier to understand.

	Individual Contributor	First Line Manager	Middle Management	Executives
Task variety	Less. mostly (~90%) repeatable tasks	mostly (~60-70%) repeatable tasks	Mostly diverse. (~30-40%) repeatable tasks	Completely diverse. <10% repeatable tasks. Rarely focused on one thing for more than 10 minutes.
Multi Tasking	Less. Context switching is less. Working on 1-3 projects	Medium. Context switching is needed. Working on 3-5 projects	High. Constant Context switching is needed. Working > 10 projects	Extremely High. Constant Context switching is needed. Working with unlimited number of projects
Tools	Use limited set of tools to get work done	Use set of tools to get work done and no tools for unrepeatable tasks	Other than tools to approve, monitor various business functions, E-mail is preliminary tool	E-mail is preliminary tool. Constantly reading information in variety of formats.
Emphasis	Getting things done. pre-defined deliverables	Ensure things are getting done	Review plans and progress.	Externally focused on business success and ensure alignment internally.
Follow-up	Task oriented follow up: work with colleagues to coordinate work	Follow up needed at task level. Remove hurdles	Follow up needed at milestone level. Remove hurdles	Follow up needed at strategic level. Take course corrections. High reliance on middle management.
Planning	Plan individual tasks	Track plans and create new project plans	Prepare plans at quarter level. Align them with strategy	Prepare plans at strategic level. Align them with business objectives set by market or customers.

Above should be easy to understand. Use this as a guidance only to understand importance of time management. Let me know if you have questions.

20 Questions about your boss

Managing up or working effectively with your boss is key to success at work. I have written one article earlier on this topic. Effectively working with your boss has covered some ideas.

I found this article called “20 questions about your boss” very useful. When I first found these, I realized that I didn’t know much about my boss. At same time, I worked with my team members and asked them write down what they know about me. And in next one-on-one discussion I clarified answers they wrote. This helped me improve my relationship with my team members

I certainly recommend reading this article and making an attempt to answer the 20 questions in collaboration with your boss. Download the PDF file attached to the link.

SWOT Analysis

I have a personal habit of performing SWOT analysis once a year. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats

Objectives of SWOT Analysis:

To become aware of strengths, weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats and  Help in decision making:

-         How to leverage Strengths?

-         How to increase number of strengths?

-         What are the opportunities and how to pursue them?

-         How to overcome weaknesses?

-         What are the upcoming threats? What can be done to avoid them?

Application to Personal life

Performing SWOT analysis in personal life can make us aware of our own strengths which we need to use in our work and personal life. Are we using our skills effectively. This helps us to look for opportunities where we can use our strengths to contribute better.

Weaknesses make us aware of areas of improvement. We are aware that we are not perfect. It helps us to perform introspection and look at ourselves critically. Very rarely in our life we take a look at weaknesses. This provides an opportunity to do that.

Opportunities are things we can do to realize our potential. Things we can do and go beyond our regular duties and responsibilities. Things that make us feel proud later in our life.

Threats are danger signs to watch for and plan for prevention of them. Taking steps to ensure that threats do not materialize.

Application to Business

Obviously this kind of analysis for a business has larger use. Without getting complacent, every business organization should make an analysis and continue to grow, improve their business.

A Sample Personal SWOT Analysis from my own experience

Strengths	Weaknesses
Testing Skills Time Management Skills Project Management Skills Web development skills Family relations Writing skills Personal homepage Book Reading Book Collection Spiritual Interest	Oral communication/Presentation skills Lack of focus Getting too much busy with work
Opportunities	Threats
Writing a book Serving as a volunteer Share experiences through homepage	Ill health

A sample Business SWOT Analysis

Strengths	Weaknesses
e-business development experience Existing Infrastructure Existing Customers Technical Skills Experienced People Customer Service Experience Office across country Business Contacts/Personal Contacts Hardworking Team Quality of work	Project Management Sales/Marketing (Getting new customers) Lack of References from existing customers (?) Quality of work
Opportunities	Threats
New Partnerships Business Opportunities in other countries Existing customer base of Indian Blitz	Low Cash Flow Weak Economy New Competition

Once such analysis is available a business organization can compare its current performance and see what can be done and make improvements.

Summary

Performing SWOT analysis does not take lot of time. It is worthwhile to do this once a year or when needed. This provides an opportunity for introspection. Either in Business or personal life, SWOT analysis can make us take decisions to change our life by making us aware of our capability and potential.

Teaching: A Noble Profession

Guru Brahma Guru Vishnu Guru Devo Maheswara
Guru sakshat parabrahma tasmaiye gurave namaha

Ancient scriptures of India give a high stature to Teaching Profession. I also regard Teaching profession with high respect. The following are a few thoughts on this noble profession which many of you may share.

Teaching is one profession which gives enormous opportunity to mould characters. Teachers can influence a student that will remain forever. Teacher is the most important individual after parents. Students in their day long association look upto teachers and try to emulate them. Every child would have played ‘teacher’ game in schooling days. The character of teacher at this impressionable stage of child plays a crucial role in shaping the child’s character. School environment also plays a role. Necessity of right education need not be stressed many times and everyone knows it.

Role and Responsibility of teacher

• Mould character of a student
• Set an example of ‘ideal’ individual
• Build ‘Values’

A teacher gets the challenge of doing this year after year.

Years after separation student come back to thank teachers. This gives a unique satisfaction to teachers. Seeing the students in a mature, prosperous position gives profound satisfaction to teacher and that alone is the most motivating factor for a teacher.

Unlike other professions where you make ‘machines’ work, this profession allows one to deal with the most complex phenomena on earth. Ranging from most studious to most mischievous students, the teacher needs to maintain a balanced attitude and approach in transforming them to mature individuals. Treat all with equality and at the same time give special treatment to each individual is easier said than done. Teachers handle this with so many tactics. Innovation in the methods used to influence students is what makes teachers different. In execution of this they don’t just use their subject knowledge but a variety of aspects of human psychology.

Recognizing that the character of a nation depends on character of individuals, teacher take their role in shaping individuals in their own way.

Education Systems should take steps to ensure that they handle their responsibility well. Systems should

• Train them regularly
• Create Teachers’ forums and encourage teaching communities
• Pay them Adequately
• Treat them with respect
• Maintain Schools properly

Education is the only investment that will have highest return on investment.