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

Welcome to the Manager Tools podcast for Monday, January 2, 2006. Well, happy new year everyone, and welcome back to Manager Tools.

Mark and I both hope you had a Merry Christmas and enjoyed the holidays as well as we did because we both had fantastic holidays and we apologize for not getting out a podcast last week during the holidays but we were just having too much fun.

Any case we're both looking forward to getting back into it in the new year and we have a lot

of ground to cover with you this year so we're anxious to get to it.

And what would the new year be without performance reviews, right?

Well, today we'll continue our conversation and performance reviews and having already covered preparing for and writing the review over the course of this weekend next we'll cover the basics of actually delivering the review.

Before we do, however, a couple of points.

It's the beginning of a new month and so don't forget to go to our

website and cash your vote on podcast alley for us. Many of you continue to be

generous and give us your vote for the month and we do appreciate it greatly.

Voting is simple, visit our website and you'll see the voting button clearly on the top of the

home page.

Also if you haven't registered on our website yet, be sure to do that. The Members Only Podcast will be out here shortly and

you won't want to miss it. So let's start 2006 off with more on performance reviews.

My guess is that delivering reviews is probably one of, if not the most stress-inducing anxiety-producing events most managers go through each year.

Only exceeded probably by getting laid off or laying someone else off.

Yeah, you know, I think they're, and what's sad about it is it's much more stress-inducing for the people

who are receiving it because the managers do it so poorly.

And you know, it goes back to something I told somebody a couple of years ago, Mike, I call it the Christmas rule, which is anything that you do once a year that's really

important to you like Christmas is going to be stressful.

You don't practice it.

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