Folks, welcome to Manager Tools. I'm Mark Horsman, one of the co-founders here. Mike usually does our introductions, but I have a special

introduction for a special cast. For those of you maybe have only joined us in the last year or two. You don't realize that every year around

Thanksgiving we take the time to re-release three Hall of Fame podcasts and we

judge Hall of Fame based on the kind of emails we get and how important it is to the community.

The cast you're going to listen to shortly is about preparing performance reviews.

So if you're a manager, this is a key part of your job

and you have to do it every year.

And we decided that it would be good to remind you of the incredible detail actually it takes to deliver, to prepare and then to deliver a really highly professional, high quality, well prepared, well written performance review.

This is another one of those casts which is in incredible detail and you'll wish probably that you had a license.

And this year is going to be especially hard for many of us as managers because our world got turned upside

down in March thanks to COVID and governmental responses there too.

And so you're going to discover that some of the standard ways you can

prepare aren't as readily available to you, the kind of goals you might have set a

year ago for your direct, probably or maybe at least got

thrown out the window in March.

And you may have to be evaluating them based on different standards and you probably need to talk to your

boss if your boss and you haven't agreed that in fact the annual goals that were set

a year

you're gonna have any purview at all in performance reviews this year.

You're gonna have to spend more time digging through email,

looking for details of things people were working on.

It's entirely possible you can't remember May and that would mean that you won't have data about how folks were performing in May.

...