How to complete your personal manager performance review for 2017
The New Year is almost upon us and for many, it’s a time to kick back and relax.
It’s been a tough year.
There have been wins and losses.
But before you take a load off, we urge you to take some time to do some reflection.
Why now?
Because now’s the best time to look back at your performance throughout the year. It’s fresh in your mind and you haven’t kicked into holiday mode just yet.
Why you must complete your manager performance review
The idea of completing a personal performance review isn’t all that alien.
It’s an opportunity to look back at how you performed in your role.
It’s a chance to review what worked this year, what didn’t, where you excelled and which areas you need to develop to become a better leader.
In this blog post, we share 13 questions that you can use to complete your personal manager performance review.
The questions relate to responsibilities that managers have in general. It is possible that you may not be responsible for certain deliverables depending on your role.
As you work through these question, take some time to reflect on how you performed. As a helpful guide, you can use the following grading system:
Achieving – met your personal standards.
Satisfactory – satisfactory performance.
Needs attention – you’ll need to work on developing the skills to perform better next year.
This review process is all about how you performed in relation to your personal standards. It’s your honest assessment of your performance.
Review questions
- Did you meet all staffing requirements? If not, why not?
All businesses move through hiring spurts and head count freezes. If you were unable to fill a role for any reasons, list them.
- Did you coach or mentor and develop any staff this year? If so, what were the highlights of the experience?
Most employees see growth as something that their managers must take a part in. Whether it’s career planning or mentorship, the guidance of a manager can help an employee become more involved and a greater contributor within your business.
- Did you foster an environment of teamwork, a place where disagreements over ideas are allowed but settled without conflict?
Team conflict is the silent killer in many organisations. People who do not trust each other make it difficult for those around them to complete mission critical tasks. Creating an environment where healthy disagreements are settled without conflict goes a long way to increasing business performance overall.
- Did you foster a culture that is consistent with the organisation’s mission, values and guiding principles?
Organisational culture is not easily defined without living examples and a set of values and guiding principles. Consider how you embodied your organisation’s culture and how you fostered its values within your team.
- Did you give immediate feedback to staff about their performance?
Immediate feedback is an important component of the employee-manager relationship. For many employees, feedback on their performance is invaluable as it helps them gauge their performance and make necessary adjustments to meet company goals.
- Did you recognise staff either through rewards programmes or any other means?
The use of staff recognition and incentive programmes has been proven to increase performance.
Often, creating sustainable and easy to administer incentive and recognition programmes requires in-depth planning and financial commitment, but once in place, they can be the difference between a highly effective business and a mediocre operation.
- How well did you manage any job rotation, leave scheduling and absenteeism?
Job rotation, leave and absenteeism all directly impact operations. Absenteeism alone costs SA R12-R16 billion per year. If you were successful or unsuccessful at managing either, detail why and how you plan to turn the tide.
- Did you communicate clearly with your team?
Clear and transparent communication has more to do with how the message is understood than its delivery in most cases. Consider how easy it was for people to act after direction from you.
- Did you manage your budget appropriately?
Poor budgeting can have near catastrophic effects on organisations. Consider where you spent your budget and how much of an impact it made on your team’s performance and the business altogether.
- Did you isolate any systems or process deficiency and replace them with better, more efficient solutions?
It’s far too easy to leave broken systems in place. As you recap on the systems and process deficiencies you worked on or encountered, think about how well you handled them.
- Did you create or facilitate the use of any feedback systems to track your department’s operational efficiencies?
Measuring performance is a big part of a manager’s role because you cannot track what you cannot measure. Think about how you can participate in making vague and possibly hard to track performance clear to measure.
- Did you meet your key performance indicators?
As an employee, you have your own set of key performance indicators. They are your responsibilities, the things you are measured against. Consider how well you performed against what is required by your business, and list the reason/s why you either succeeded or not, as well as how to perform better in the New Year.
- Did you develop any relationships with leaders in roles above yours?
Developing relationships with your line of leadership is an important part of building a satisfying career. This is because the right relationships can provide the mentorship you need and open doors you otherwise would not have been aware of.
Look back at the year and think about which relationships you worked on and those you want to develop next year.
Conclusion
Professional growth is achieved through conscious effort. Using this list of manager performance review questions is a great way to uncover how you performed this year, and where there is room to improve and become a better leader.