Management Woes

Don't get me wrong, I lead a great team. The types of problems that are deposited on my desk range from simple to extraordinarily complex. Regardless of how difficult the issue, I find that I always have a competent and qualified expert that can tackle it. My biggest challenge is understanding what success looks like, fitting the task appropriately into the priority stack, setting the correct expectation with the requester, and elegantly delegating the task to the correct subordinate. That is what I see my role as.


But this time of year, I do very little of that. Instead, I commit myself to performance management. It is the most difficult aspect of my job. Several months ago I blogged about the interim performance reviews and how time consuming they are. This time of year is twice as difficult. I have 27 direct reports. I will spend 30 minutes preparing for each review, which will take one hour. So reviewing 2009 performance for 27 direct reports requires an entire week. Then we start planning and communicating 2010 objectives. That will take at least another week.

So that is 2 weeks of work devoted solely to performance management. My voice will not survive the abuse of doing all 27 reviews one after another. I will commit 4 hours a day to the process until complete. That stretches the 2 weeks process across 4. My January is planned out.

It wouldn't be so bad if we could just focus on performance management for the entire month of January. But we cannot. Normal business activity does not stop, so either I cram the normal 8 hours of work into 4 or something gets delayed. But I will get through it ... sometime in February. Then interim reviews in July, followed by final reviews next January. Oh well, that is the life of a manager.