Preface to the Second Edition

There’s a popular misconception that the work of improving performance starts and ends with the performance appraisal meeting. If you look at what most managers do, it seems like they believe this misconception. The time they spend in performance appraisals is just about all the time they spend on improving performance. As a result, the many benefits of managing performance are lost as they focus solely on the appraisal process, the end point and, unfortunately, the wrong point.

Is there a secret to improving work performance? In a way. It’s simple. The secret for organizations, managers, and employees is to put more emphasis on making sure managers and employees know what they must accomplish. When each employee understands what he or she needs to do to succeed, it’s much easier for that person to contribute. It’s also much easier for managers to do their jobs, improve productivity, and manage proactively. Otherwise, managers will spend far too much time stomping out many, many small fires rather than preventing them.

Clear purpose helps everyone succeed, and that’s what everyone wants and benefits from. Appraisals look in the rear view mirror and involve looking at things that are often too late to change. Planning performance—setting goals and objectives—is the opposite. It’s looking forward to deal with things that are yet to come and are still under our control.

This book helps you set performance goals and objectives—those statements that are used to aim and guide performance throughout the year. These same performance goals are also used to evaluate employee performance and, more importantly, identify barriers to performance so they can be removed. The purpose of this book is to make the goal-setting process as easy and painless as possible. When you get the goals in place, it also makes the appraisal process much easier. It’s the goals that make employee reviews and appraisals work!

The performance goals (“perfect phrases”) offered in this book should help you and your employees come to agreement about what is expected of employees (and their managers) to maximize the value each adds to the organization.

These phrases, translated into goals and objectives for your employees, will improve your ability to track progress all year long and reduce the stress and anxiety often associated with performance reviews when the review criteria are fuzzy, vague, and misunderstood.

Before you start, one thing. Please read the introductory material. It explains some important issues regarding objectivity and specificity of goals and objectives. We believe that for most employees and managers, what is most important is that the “goals in use” are negotiated and based on a mutual, common understanding of the meaning of the words. We stress a negotiated common understanding approach because it’s virtually impossible to set precise, specific unambiguous goals for many jobs while keeping the goals relevant and meaningful. If you skip the front material you will miss important parts that make the rest of this book make sense.

If you would like more in-depth coverage and explanations of performance management and performance review processes, try the following:

The Busy Learner’s Kit for Making Performance Management and Appraisal VALUABLE, by Robert Bacal, CreateSpace, 2010

Manager’s Guide to Performance Reviews, by Robert Bacal, McGraw-Hill, 2003

Performance Management, by Robert Bacal, McGraw-Hill, 1999

If you need assistance with writing performance reviews, try the first book in the Perfect Phrases series:

Perfect Phrases for Performance Reviews, Second Edition, by Douglas Max and Robert Bacal, McGraw-Hill, 2010

We’d also like to invite you to make use of The Performance Management Resource Center on the Internet. You’ll find hundreds of articles and tips on the performance management process and be able to interact with others involved in performance management. You will also find some useful job aids connected with performance improvement, including our Helpcard series for busy learners. You can access these materials at www.performance-appraisals.org.

Acknowledgments

You’d think that writing books like this is easy. It’s harder than it looks. We’d like to thank John Woods of CWL Publishing Enterprises and McGraw-Hill for their patience, perseverance, and contributions to this book.

Finally, a special thanks is due to Nancy Moore, who contributed to a number of the sections in this book with both general and specific ideas on goals and works with me on all my books.

—Robert Bacal