Welcome to Manager Tools. In keeping with our holiday tradition, here is some of our guidance from our Hall of Fame.

You're listening to the Manager Tools podcast for Monday, December 12, 2005. Hello this is Michael Lozan and for our long-term listeners welcome

back. For our newer listeners, thanks for joining us today.

Well, it's that time of year again.

Most managers we know right now are thinking about the holidays and annual reviews.

Now you didn't forget about that did you? Well after years of

managing training consulting we've concluded that this is one of the most poorly

managed and implemented processes that we're aware of. It's not hard to do but for

plenty of bad reasons many managers just don't handle this responsibility well.

For those of you who do, it's an enormous competitive advantage.

Now, this is a huge topic, so we're dedicating at least the next three

podcast to helping you deliver an effective performance review. We've taken the

approach that you haven't had a whole year one-on-one's despite I'm sure

your dedication to doing so in the coming year, so you don't have the related notes

and haven't done quarterly reviews to prepare for this one.

In this first podcast, we start walking through how to write the review.

There are three steps in this first part of the process,

collecting data, evaluating data, and finally writing the review. All three of those steps are

going to take about two podcasts to get through, and then starting with the third cast in the series we'll talk

about how to actually deliver the evaluation. So with that let's get to the

conversation with Mark. I think today's topic is going to be pretty useful to folks. It's about this at the time

of year when people start thinking about reviews and getting ready and I know a lot of managers

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