Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Performance”
Did I miss the memo? When did the venerable Performance Improvement Plan — a managerial non sequitur that often has little to do with performance OR improvement — morph into the more concise but equally Orwellian “Corrective Action?” I bumped into this new terminology for what most managers lovingly refer to as a “PIP” a couple of weeks ago when …
A quick prelude to my discussion today: Enes Kantor, the former NY Knick center rode the bench almost all of this NBA season before being traded to the Portland Trailblazers, who had him play significant minutes during the playoffs. It’s a little hard to feel too sorry for him receiving $17 million in compensation to keep his seat warm until …
I’ve had a lot of jobs so I’ve worked for a lot of different managers — the good, the bad, and the really ugly. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from all of them, it’s this: it’s rare when you find one that you would really want to work for again. In fact, when I try to count the good …
Let me first start by saying I love being an HR professional. I love the insight that the profession gives you into a company and its employees. But as HR people know, this insight can often be a double-edged sword. Instead of being coaches, we often become referees, and instead of ambassadors of our organization, we become law enforcement to …
Brown-noser. Suck-up. Kiss-A**. These are the terms you’ll hear. Pay them no mind, white-collar worker. You’re here to win. Those are the stones thrown by the masses who don’t have what it takes to win–#jealous #bastards. What’s the game we’re trying to win? The game of getting internal promotions. I once had a friend from my MBA class email me …
Gather ’round the campfire, kids, because I’m here with a story from a galaxy far away, a time when things seemed simpler, when good was easier to distinguish from evil, and when we weren’t so divided. It was also a time when “UPS Driver” was a premium job. Don’t laugh out loud–that’s disrespectful. UPS Drivers were once knights among us …
Everyone’s heard the phrase “a bad apple spoils the bunch,” but in my work experience, this hasn’t been true. In my experience, it isn’t the bad apple that spoils the bunch; it’s the semi-bad apple. That apple that you think is just as good as the rest (or pretty close), until you realize it’s not just as good, and that …
I read a quote last week that I would surely butcher if I tried to recall word-for-word, but the overall theme of the quote was this: People are not required to be constantly available to you, or you to them. And yet, there I sat at 8 AM on a Thursday morning with 57 notifications on my phone. By 7 …
I learned long ago that you should always be ready to take good advice — no matter where it comes from. This month, it came from a guy named Michael Dermer who touts himself in his blog and newsletter as The Lonely Entrepreneur. His words of wisdom were short, sweet, and spot-on. He said: “Turn off at a respectable time, …
I read a lot of HR stuff about high performers. We all want an entire population of these employees at our companies. Adding more high performers means better overall results, which means better everything, right? Maybe not. Depending on your culture, you could be making it hard for the best performers to stay. As Long As It Helps Me A …
