Do you have moxie, that invaluable ability to face problems with spirit and courage as opposed to whining or giving up?

Moxie is priceless.

It’s moxie that

• gets you through a bad review—whether you’re giving or receiving it;
• gets you back on the bicycle when you fall off;
• lets you perform when you find yourself on the karaoke stage after too many martinis;
• supports you in (and out) of love;
• keeps you from divorcing your spouse; or
• strangling your kids during summer vacation, or
• jumping off a bridge for a variety of reasons.

Moxie is your life’s foundation.

Moxie has more synonyms than Roget ever dreamed of and most people call it something else.

What do you call your moxie?

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Although there’s often a substantial lag between hiring and productivity there’s a lot you can do to reduce it.

Yesterday we discussed what to do between acceptance and start to solidify your hires, integrate them into the team and familiarize them with the company’s market and products.

That effort doesn’t end the day they report to work.

During the first couple of days take time to go over the information you’ve already shared (see previous post) and get some feel of where the knowledge gaps that will slow productivity. Be sure to make this a positive experience—it shouldn’t feel like finals week.

To have the most productive employees, you must build a partnership. Your people must believe that you’ll treat them fairly and help them to grow to reach their true potential—and you must do exactly that.

People respond to this treatment by going the extra yard, working the extra hours, becoming, if they aren’t already, and real 10 percenters.

Offer plenty of feedback, waiting for the annual review is grossly unfair, as is giving feedback only when something is wrong. Honest and authentic feedback don’t mean abusive or destructive. Offering recognition of what the person does well and being candid about areas that need improvement are two hallmarks of a good review.

This holds true for all your people, candid feedback throughout the year means no surprises during the annual review.

Stay with the buddy system you established at acceptance, having access to someone who knows the ropes and culture is invaluable to those new to the company and the team.

Be sensitive to any actions or behaviors that are causing a problem, or have that potential and address them immediately. It’s far easier to “nip it in the bud” on a friendly, informal basis than to let it escalate into a major situation.

You’ve invested a lot of time and money in acquiring every one of your employees and building a world-class team, group, department, or company. It’s just plain stupid to ignore, even for one day, anything that will damage those efforts. Early intervention is key to avoiding human-based problems and that’s your real job as a manager.

Always remember that when it comes time for your own review you are who you hire and nothing you do as an individual will offset a low-productivity team or high turnover.

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A few of weeks ago I wrote about how kids believe they are entitled to good grades for trying as opposed to achieving.

That post was sparked by Andrew’s comment and he also sent me an article about grade inflation in colleges showing that the trend is progressing unabated.

An article today in the NYTimes describes a new approach to grades,

“In Pelham, the second-grade report card includes 39 separate skill scores — 10 each in math and language arts, 2 each in science and social studies, and a total of 15 in art, music, physical education, technology and “learning behaviors” — engagement, respect, responsibility, organization…standards-based report cards helped students chart their own courses for improvement; as part of the process, they each develop individual goals, which are discussed with teachers and parents, and assemble portfolios of work.”

“I was never the A student, and it would constantly frustrate me,” Dr. Dennis Lauro, Pelham’s superintendent said. “Nobody ever bothered to tell me how to get that A, to get to that next level.”

I think that the approach is good since it focuses back on learning and not just on testing and it’s being adopted in various districts across the country.

The down side is that most districts don’t have the money or parental ability, not just involvement, of an upscale Westchester, NY suburb.

Currently grading in most schools, K-12 through college, is on a curve where the best gets an A. But as Dr. Thomas R. Guskey, a professor at Georgetown College in Kentucky, says “The dilemma with that system is you really don’t know whether anybody has learned anything. They could all have done miserably, just some less miserably than others.”

I agree. When people do average work they shouldn’t get an A because everyone else is below average or flunked.

If it can be made to work I think the idea of the kids working with parents and teachers to set goals to work towards and the sense of accomplishment that comes from achieving them is excellent; it’s motivating and prepares them for the real world of performance reviews—at least when they’re done correctly.

This could be a step forward, but it involves change.

“The executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, Gerald Tirozzi — who supports standards-based report cards — said that many educators and parents were far from ready to scrap letter grades, especially for older students, in part because they worry about the ripple effects on things like the honor roll and class rank.”

“I think the present grading system — A, B, C, D, F — is ingrained in us,” Mr. Tirozzi said. “It’s the language which college admissions officers understand; it’s the language which parents understand.”

And we certainly can’t expect adults to change or learn anything new just to improve kids’ education—can we?

This reminds me of something that happened decades ago. Women would taste baby food and if it didn’t taste good to them they wouldn’t buy it, so Gerber added salt in order to appeal to the adults. When the public finally woke up and screamed Gerber quickly changed the formulas.

Right now the public is whining, any suggestions on how to get them screaming?

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Last week I promised to provide you with a simple, amazing tool that would help identify goals for each of your people and a whole lot more.

It’s the GSA (Great Skills Assessment) that uses a spreadsheet to monitors both hard and soft skills. If you already do something similar this post may open your eyes to additional uses.

The best reviews help people grow, not by beating them over the head but by laying out an achievable plan for improving areas in which they are weak.

An accurate GSA that’s frequently updated makes it easy to identify what will enhance a person’s value to the company in meeting its corporate goals as well as progressing on a desired career path.

Its value increases by merging individual assessments into one for the whole organization that you can use when planning projects.

And it’s invaluable when it’s time to fill an opening; a complete GSA is the best guarantee that you won’t end up with all your group’s skills in one area and gaping holes in others.

There are many ways to approach assessment creation and usage depending on your MAP and attitude towards inclusiveness and openness, but here is how my clients do it.

1. Looking at the template you’ll notice that the first three sections are public while the fourth is marked private. Start by sending the public part of the assessment template to each of your people and ask them to list their skills and rate them on a scale of one to five. Ask them to include not just the skills that they use at work, but all their skills, such as those they use at home or in volunteer work. You may be pleasantly surprised at the unknown depth and variety of abilities you find in your organization.

2. Post the results on your department intranet and ask everybody to add to each other’s profile—this includes you. Many times people have skills and abilities they ignore because previous bosses didn’t value them, but peers are apt to notice and comment and you may value stuff of which they aren’t aware.

3. Once everyone is finished (for the moment, you should encourage people to keep their profiles updated) you want to discuss specific results separately with each person, especially those that diverge from your own knowledge or opinions. Be patient; by the end of the conversation the two of you should be in agreement on both skills and ratings.

4. The private section of the soft skills is completed by you and should remain private. Use it as a guide when you’re coaching, assigning roles, helping the person prepare for their next career move, etc.—and to evaluate your own managerial success. If the public skills improve and goals are met, but you don’t see improvement in the private areas then look in the mirror since those skills are typically a direct reflection of management.

Combining the goal-setting procedure described last week with the GSA makes it easy to identify, define and agree on each person’s goals, both short and long-term.

Success today means constantly reinventing yourself and your organization—I call it continual course correction and the GSA makes it much easier.

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The foremost thought to hold in you mind when creating a positive and powerful review culture is that it’s similar to Chinese cooking—most of the time is spent in preparation, whereas the food cooks quickly.

(Note: terminology can be confusing; ‘goal’ and ‘objective’ are interchangeable as are ‘appraisal’ and ‘review’.)

Here are the underlying steps that you need to learn, practice and absorb into your MAP.

Annual reviews alone don’t work even when that’s all your company requires.

To succeed people need semiformal feedback each quarter along with constant, informal daily input and coaching focused on helping them achieve the goals set forth in the previous annual review. (More on goals later.)

Reviews are the same as every other management task—they require good planning, open communications and accountability on both sides.

The first step to painless reviews is to commit to doing

• one HR-blessed annual review, with full paperwork, during the last two weeks of December;
• four quarterly reviews within the first week of each quarter; and
• constant, informal, ‘how am I doing’ feedback all year long.

Remember that

• any time you set a goal it needs a delivery date to be real; and
• never make commitments you either can’t or aren’t planning to fulfill.

First tell your people what to expect, then post your commitment on the department intranet and tell every person you hire how it works—and follow-through.

When you commit publicly you make yourself accountable.

Good reviews aren’t about filling out a lot of paperwork, whether by hand or computer. Yes, you need to follow company guidelines and use company approved forms, but as stated at the beginning, those are the mechanics.

The secret of a positive review culture is defining exactly what you want a person to accomplish during the year, discussing the goals and refining them together, in other words, the heart is the interaction between you and each person on your team, because one size does not fit all.

The result is that your people not only know exactly what their goals are, but they own them.

Setting Goals

• The basic rule is to never set more than three to five major goals in a year and the exact number depends on their size and complexity.

• Annual review goals should be high level, complex, and take 12 months to accomplish. They can include hard skills, such as technical certification, and soft skills, such as improving presentation skills.

• All goals should be quantified. “Be more willing to share” is a self defeating goal because it offers no way for the person or you to measure improvement; it becomes totally subjective, a matter of opinion and a source of contention at next year’s review. Instead the goal might be “Increase time spent sharing knowledge 10%” and agree on what the baseline is currently.

• Work together during the discussions to break down large/complex annual goals into smaller, more manageable goals that can be achieved each quarter and still more bit-sized pieces for each month, week and even day.

The cool thing is that achieving a constant stream of smaller goals keeps people motivated and prevents the large goals from overwhelming them.

And before you start complaining about the time involved, perhaps you should go back and read your job description or, better yet, go back a little further and think about all the lousy reviews you’ve had along the way, either because they didn’t happen or because they were all form and no substance.

Then think about, hopefully, the manager(s) who saw the value and used reviews to challenge, stretch and juice your growth, so you were ready for a promotion that put you in their shoes.

Then decide which one you want to be for your people.

Be sure to come back next week when I show you a simple, amazing tool that helps identify goals for each of your people and also has some terrific side benefits.

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As discussed last week accountability stems from the public nature of an action and one of the best ways to inject strong accountability into your organization is with a positive review function that your people might actually like!

Sound impossible? It’s not and over the next few weeks we’ll discuss how to make it happen.

The first thing that you need to understand is that there are two totally separate parts of the review process.

The visible part, the mechanics, is dictated by your company, but that’s all it is—mechanics; usually a timetable and a set of forms.

The important part is invisible and is bound by your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).

In other words, positive reviews are a function of how you choose to think about them.

Done correctly reviews are painless and even enjoyable for both parties.

Done incorrectly reviews are painful, embarrassing, discouraging, upsetting, frustrating or all of the above—for both parties.

The bottom line of reviews can be summed up in two words—no surprises.

Any time an employee is surprised by information during a review means that you aren’t doing your job as a manager.

You avoid surprises by understanding the philosophy behind the review process and how it should work and then allocating the time and effort to make it work.

How many times during or after your own annual review have you said out loud, or silently screamed in your head, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

How many times since you were promoted has one of your own people felt the same way?

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