At the STC 2009 Summit, I participated in the Management Progression. For those who aren’t familiar with a progression, it’s a bit like speed-dating, with a somewhat smaller chance of rejection. You have a large room with several big round tables. At each table is a presenter with a sign for his or her topic (My topic was Employee Performance Evaluation, a real barn-burner!). Attendees choose a table and join a conversation. After about 20 minutes, the moderator blows a virtual whistle and everyone except the presenters chooses a new table. You continue until you run out of time (our session was 90 minutes, so we got several rounds in).
That’s about it; it’s simple, but seems to work pretty well. The presenters typically do a little preparation, but mostly go with whatever the people at their table are interested in discussing. For my topic, I prepared a checklist for the performance evaluation process. I thought it turned out pretty well, so I’ve posted the checklist in PDF form. Feel free to use it as you wish for non-commercial purposes and please post any comments you have.
I found the progression to be a great deal of fun. There were a lot of good attendees, ranging in management experience from a non-manager who has to mentor one person, to long-time managers with years of experience. The nice thing about that range is that we got new ideas, great questions, and a lot more good advice than I could have provided alone. The pattern that seemed to work best was for each person to introduce him or herself and say what he or she wanted to get out of the session. Many attendees had specific issues to discuss, and we probably spent 70%-80% of the time on those issues.
There were a lot of great ideas batted around. One of my favorites, which is an oldie but goody, answers the question, “How do you handle a situation where someone who is a friend, and formerly a peer in the organization, now reports to you?” There’s no question there will be a change in the relationship, and it can be an uncomfortable one. One attendee said that she prefaces management conversations with the reminder that she is wearing her “management” hat, not her friend hat. In other words, she makes it clear that she has new responsibilities, and that to fulfill those responsibilities, she must take on a different role than before, at least in the office. If she doesn’t, she is not doing her job, and of course, a friend wouldn’t want her to fail at her job.
That won’t disarm everyone, but it does make the important point that as a manager you have a role to play, and responsibilities to meet, and that friendship and prior relationships have to bend to fit that new role (and sometimes they break). It also implies that you can put the friend hat back on when you’re outside of the business context, though in my experience once you have that management hat, former relationships, even if they remain strong, will never be the same. I’ve had the good fortune to keep as friends some who have reported to me and others that I’ve reported to, but it’s not 100%.
There was lots of other good interaction, most of it directed at specific questions related to performance management, rather than the formal, yearly performance evaluation process that my checklist is aimed at, but that didn’t matter, since the objective was to discuss the topics people cared about, not put forth a pre-determined agenda.
The checklist is derived from the Performance Evaluation chapter in Managing Writers. I posted a draft version of that chapter last year in four sections. You can find it starting here.
