Welcome to Manager Tools. This week a special Hall of Fame podcast in honor of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, preparing performance reviews. Here we go.

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 podcasts to helping you deliver

an effective performance review.

We've taken the approach that you haven't had a whole year

one-on-ones 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 from the series we'll

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

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