07/13/23

CEO Shoptalk: Doing The Bloody Work

Other day a CEO who had been a client pre-Pandemic calls me and wants to chat about the difficulties of getting folks back to the office who had been weaned from the office whilst working from home during the Pandemic and post-Pandemic, hardly a novel topic.

As I often do, I explored the basis for what was happening and I asked him about hiring, objective setting, performance appraisal, and compensation. We also discussed “quiet quitting” and its management equivalent: “quiet firing.” Continue reading

02/6/21

CEO Shoptalk — Good v Evil (Or, The Message At Midnight From The Garden Of Good & Evil)

If you are not a CEO, stop reading and move on. CEO Shoptalk is for CEOs only and, of course, you. Because you are special and one day you will also be a CEO, so read on, Alphonse.

The other day I get into a chat with not one, but two CEOs about the same issue I spoke of the other day, Performance Appraisal.

We are discussing the performance of someone who is clearly not a superstar, but is a solid utility infielder meaning they are not going to be promoted any time soon, but they are also not going to be fired.

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01/24/21

Performance Appraisal And The PLAN

You’re a startup on your way. You are at that magic 50+ employee level at which you start to pay attention to things like Performance Appraisal. With that level of staffing, you will find out that when the tide goes out, some folks have been swimming naked — meaning not everybody is a super star.

Sure, you remember this — click on to see larger:

Business planning building blocks graphic

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08/21/20

Performance Appraisal As Inspiration And Motivation

Performance appraisal in small to medium companies (including startups) is one of those things that CEOs equate to going to the dentist. Not only do they not like it, they are not good at it.

There are a lot of very odd ideas at play here in the performance appraisal business — 360 degree appraisals which also fold in the guy selling flowers on the street corner — which makes the process a moving target; moving targets are notoriously hard to hit.

The message I bring you today is that a suspiciously simple, well-designed and executed performance appraisal system can be the most powerful personal tool wielded by a keen CEO for inspiration and motivation of individual team members.

It can also be clean, streamlined, and painless.

Let’s take a quick look at where performance appraisal fits within the overall schema of a company’s organizational matrix. Click on the graphic to see it at a larger scale.

Business-planning-building-blocks-graphic

What I want you to see is that performance appraisal is at the foundation level of the company’s Vision, Mission, Strategy Tactics, Objectives, Values, and Culture.

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09/28/17

Critique — CEO Shoptalk

Everybody needs a good critique, right? Ahhh, criticism is the breakfast of champions, no?

Big Red Car here on a cloudy Texas day. Only going to be in the low 80s today. Time to start thinking about the swimming pool, eh? Haha, Hell no. Swimming today, y’all.

So when you’re a CEO you will receive and give critiques. Makes sense, no? Performance appraisal — feedback — is the breakfast of champions.

Today, I want to get your mind right about how to receive this when it is you being critiqued. Ready?

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07/11/13

CEO Performance Appraisal

Big Red Car here.  Going to be another nice day here in the ATX.  Why not?

So The Boss was visiting with one of his CEO pals and the subject turned to the issue of performance appraisal.  CEO performance appraisal.  This particular CEO is working for a well developed company that is clearly successful and seemingly has a Board of Directors that is well constituted and attentive to their duties.

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02/14/13

Vision, Mission, Strategy, Values >>>>> OBJECTIVES

Big Red Car here.  Bluebird day here in the ATX.  Top down day.

So The Boss gets a bunch of emails in regard to the post about Performance Appraisal.  He gave away a free exemplar — a form — which showed how he used to do this years ago.  You can get one at that blog post or later on in this one.  Don’t fret.  Useful free stuff coming your way.

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