A few notes from training I received from my company’s VP of Human Resources:

• Our focus is not on hiring. It starts way before that. The cycle is to attract, retain, and grow talent within our organization. It must regenerate itself.
• The KEY to retention–of getting people to want to work for you–is to catch people in the act of doing good.
• Regular formal & informal feedback is critical to reinforce the positive and fix problems quickly. Once in a while, you’ll have to correct something, but most of your energy shold be spent positively.
• Consider the paradigm-shift that will occur in your employee’s mind when they honestly feel you’re invested in their success–their career, etc…
• Formal reviews can not be carried out effectively without up-front understanding of exactly what will be measured, by what standards it will be measured, and with the employee being fully-engaged in the process to know–at any given point–how she or he is measuring up.

  Performance Standards should encompass the following areas:

• Quality: How well you want the job done.
• Quantity: How much of the job must be done.
• Frequncy: How often should you expect this part of the job to be done.
• Outcome: As a result of the (above) activity, what outcome do you expect?

It is interesting, as I write this, that 80% of this is all about helping people and giving them tracks to run on so they can perform–on their own–at their best.

The rest is the tedious part–building the tracks.

This is the part of managing others that’s boring and ugly and we want to brush it under the rug. But, as Mark & Mike at Manager-Tools.com say, Good Management (the rails part)is not sexy. It issupposed to be boring. That is how you know it’s working.

The fun part of management is seeing others succeed.

Popularity: 9% [?]