It's become tradition here at Manager Tools for us to release our performance review casts

for many, many years ago over the Thanksgiving break. Many companies are going to be having

performance review season from now until the end of the year. There's going to be another group of you that probably be doing your performance reviews in January.

We released these casts at Thanksgiving every year so that you can get a jump on your reviews.

Today, we're giving you preparing the performance review.

It was a two-part cast when we originally recorded it, but we smushed it down so you can get all the goodness in one go.

After me, you'll hear Mike introduce the cast, and then after the cast ends, you'll hear me again at the

transition point, so you know when to stop.

If you want to split your listening into two, here we go.

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

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