Welcome to Manager Tools. We're coming to D.C. December 3rd and 4th will be in the Washington, D.C.

We're hosting an EMC and ECC, Effective Management Day 1 and Effective Communication Day 2.

If you're in the area or willing to travel, it's an opportunity to learn the next steps to becoming a more effective professional, better management, better

communication, and an opportunity to meet other professionals in the D.C. area or from nearby.

We love coming to D.C. and we'd really like to see you there too. Sign up at manager-tools.com

forward slash training. This is Sarah. Every year around this time, we like to release a series of guidance

designed to help you prepare for writing performance reviews. And since the season is upon us,

today we'll be covering a very important topic, preparing performance reviews.

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 of 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.

...