Performance Management: It's Actually Not a Waste of Time

We're coming up on the start of our performance review cycle here at work where there will be much gnashing of teeth, tearing of garments, soliloquies about the momentous accomplishments achieved, and anxiety over whether or not your boss thinks you did anything worthwhile... or at least to some that can be the mindset associated with the dreaded performance management process. It's quite natural to feel a significant amount of anxiety around this process for more than a few reasons--you are being evaluated by another person, you may or may not be promoted, your pay may change, and you have to attempt to grade yourself without sounding either self-deprecating or over-congratulatory. It doesn't necessarily have to be this way, though.

Many people try to avoid the performance management topic as much as possible and simply trudge through it at the end of the year because they have to. It's not something important, it's not something meaningful, and it's viewed lower on the priorities list than any other task being worked on. I held this mindset when I entered the working world, partially because I felt I was awesome at everything and didn't see the benefits that came out of the process, and partially because I didn't see any tangible benefits outside of my next raise. Of course there weren't going to be any benefits if I didn't take it seriously. Just like any one-way conversation, the person not invested will get nothing out of it. So if you have performance management anxiety or think that it does nothing for you, I may have a few things to offer from my personal experience that can transform performance management from a chore into a tool to get you where you want to be.

Get Invested

Frankly, if you don't have a care in the world about the performance management process your mind is made up that you'll get nothing from it and, more than likely, your manager or coach won't care a whole lot to do more than the bare minimum when rating you.  That doesn't help anyone and actually does make the process a useless waste of everyone's time.  However, even if you don't believe in the process, forcing yourself to get involved achieves two things--it gets your manager to note that you care about your development and, more importantly, it puts your manager on task to invest time and effort into truly evaluating you and your work. Shirking the process or avoiding meetings or tasks associated to it shows that you don't value it, but if you attend, engage, and force a smile (if you have to) it will do wonders for both of you because you'll start to look deeply at your work, your attitude, and your overall contribution, identifying what you are simply amazing at doing and, as a seemingly unfortunate byproduct (it's really not!), what you could improve.

Take the Initiative

This may be one of the toughest things to do when it comes to performance management, but it may also be the most important. Instead of waiting for each of the dreaded meetings you'll have with your manager or coach about "how well you did this year," take the lead and schedule some time with your boss to discuss how you've been doing. To really catch him or her off-guard, go outside of the standard performance management timeline and schedule your own meetings with your manager to discuss how things are going, ideally setting up something that is recurring throughout the course of the year.

By taking a peak at your performance and discussing it on a regular basis, once the year's end rolls around your final ratings from your boss shouldn't come as a huge surprise--you should already have a general idea of where you stand. You can also identify potential weaknesses to strengthen or pitfalls to avoid as the year goes on if you talk about what's happening in your work throughout the year. By doing this, you will also have demonstrable proof (assuming you keep notes) that you were improving, doing what was expected, or going beyond what was asked.  You're not stuck scratching your head at the end of the year trying to remember what you've done. Instead you have the groundwork already laid for your final assessment discussions.

Find Out "What It Takes"

We all want promotions. We all want more pay. We all want more perks. So how do you ensure that you get them? Ask.  It's a pretty simple concept, but it can often be hard to bring up or to get your manager to give you a well articulated answer. However, be direct and find out exactly what you need to do to reach the next level. You might need to initially settle for generalizations since your boss may not have actually thought this through in detail, but if you are both invested in your development, hopefully he or she will give some thought to the topic and have something specific to provide to you in time.

Once you know what you need to do, go do it!  Sounds easy, right? In some cases, sure, it'll be no sweat, but sometimes it may be more difficult. What it takes might be performing certain tasks that you don't have access to yet (like managing personnel... when you don't have any direct reports). If this is the case, explore with your manager how you can be put into situations where you have the opportunity to achieve what it'll take. It might not be something that can happen right away, but always be working to make it happen.

Change

One of the toughest parts of being evaluated is being told what someone thinks you're not doing well or what your weaknesses are. It's easy to get defensive, to shrug off what someone says, or to attack back.  It's much tougher to take in criticisms, reflect on them, and discuss them. Yes, it sucks being told you could do something better, but be honest with yourself--we all have weaknesses and could all use a bit of improvement, so take the chance to do so!

It is important to get specifics about what you could shore up. Generalizations don't help you since you don't know exactly what you could do differently, and it doesn't help your manager since he or she is throwing such a wide net that improvements you may attempt to make slip through the net because it's not what he or she is specifically looking for. Work together to flesh out where you can make improvements, make a plan on how to change, and then execute on that plan.

Be Serious

This should go without saying, but it is possible to make attempts at implementing the above changes without really taking things seriously. If you want to succeed, in most cases, you can't do it completely on your own (if you can--great! I'm jealous!).  You can learn from those who manage you, those who have experience in your field, and those who have been tasked with developing you. You need to have levity when approaching the performance management topic, valuing it as a tool in itself and not just a means to getting your next raise. In the short term if you "game" the system you can get that incremental raise or look a bit better than your co-worker, but from a long-term perspective if you seriously want to grow, develop, mature, and achieve personal goals, you need to take performance management seriously and, as much as it may pain you, go through the full process being fully engaged.

At the end of the day, it's not your manager who decides your future, even though they may control your next bonus or promotion, it is in your own hands.  If you are fine with the way things are and think you're doing great, then this article wasn't really something you need, but if you want to aspire to improve and make performance management matter, I hope that I've been able to provide a little insight into some methods that could help. I can only speak from my personal experience, so take it how you will, but it's proven to be quite helpful in my current career trajectory up to this point.

Why Can't Twitter and Facebook Just Get Along?

Despite my overwhelming detesting of Twitter on a conceptual basis, I've come to realize that even though I cannot truly fathom a good reason why people are actually using it, people are. Because of this, and because I'm competing against my wife to see who has a higher Klout score, I've decided to raise from the dead, Lazarus style, my old Twitter account. I already use Facebook more than I probably should so I thought I could simply set things up so that whatever I posted to Facebook would go to Twitter.  Boy, I sure didn't know what I was in for.

To start, there's no way to directly publish to Twitter your Facebook statuses and links. There are numerous ways, including a pretty rock solid Twitter Facebook app, to import tweets into Facebook, but going the other way appeared to not be possible. However, I was not ready to give up. I was bound and determined to find a way to publish statuses and links only once and have them go to Twitter. Also, I wanted to to keep Facebook as my primary way of interacting with people and Twitter as simply something where my content got pushed to. I don't plan on following Twitter users that much because most of what comes through Twitter is garbage anyways (I blame the ridiculous 140 character limit--people who like to use full words and sentences just can't get much in that small of a space).

I started my adventure by trying to find a tool or automated solution to grab my Facebook statuses and push them over to Twitter. Facebook used to have all kinds of RSS feeds at your disposal, but now they seemed to have made them inaccessible unless you do some sleuthing to uncover what your status feed is. This post tells you how to get it.  This leads me to my first head-scratching moment. Why the heck doesn't Facebook want you using RSS feeds any more? My guess is they don't want you exporting your content to other applications or places so that you are stuck inside of their walled garden. So, now I have a feed for my status updates (note: this doesn't, unfortunately, include posted links, pictures, or uploads... just your plain text status updates.)

To get the RSS feed to publish to Twitter, I use Twitterfeed. It lets you take just about any RSS feed you can find and use it to post the contents of the feed to Twitter, Facebook, or other social services.  Once you enter in your Facebook RSS feed, you'll need to make a quick tweak to how Twitterfeed parses the feed for posting to Twitter. In the Advanced Settings section, make sure that the Post Content is set to "description only" (as shown below). If you leave it as "title only" you'll end up having every tweet prefixed with your name and if you leave it as "title & description" you'll be double posting your content. Also make sure the "Post Link" checkbox is deselected.

So this takes care of getting my Facebook status updates turned into tweets. But I also have a blog (that you're reading) and I want to make sure that when I post a new blog post it automatically gets tweeted and posted to Facebook. To do this, I used Twitterfeed for tweeting and RSS Graffiti for posting to my Facebook wall. Let's start with Twitterfeed and using it to publish my blog posts.

First, get your blog's RSS or atom feed.  Then create another feed in Twitterfeed and input your blog's RSS feed URL. Then in the Advanced Settings section you'll want to set the Post Content to "title only" (at least if you're using a blogger site). This makes the content of your tweet the title of your blog post. If you choose "description only" it will start pulling from the beginning of your actual post and if you leave it "title and description" it will use your post title and the description combined. And, I'm guessing, most post's contents won't fit in the 140 character limit of a tweet, especially since you need to save some room for the bit.ly URL. Since you want to link to your post, make sure the "Post Link" checkbox is selected and (if you have a bit.ly account) input your bit.ly details. Make sure to also have your Post Sorting done by pubDate and, lastly, if you want to prefix your tweet with anything use the "Post Prefix" field (I prefer to prefix all blog tweets with "New Blog Post:").

This gets your blog posts to Twitter, but what about Facebook? Thankfully RSS Graffiti is dead simple to use. Just authorize the application, input your blog's feed, leave the default settings as-is, and you should be ready to go. You can customize the frequency of how often it checks your feed or if you want to use a bit.ly account or how many posts it can post at once. None of those are essential to making the application work, though.

So now we have to figure out how to tie links I want to share between both Facebook and Twitter. This proved to be harder than I thought since Facebook apparently no longer has feeds for shared links or content. So, I instead decided I would simply share links to a source that would feed Facebook via Twitterfeed (that will then be tweeted through the Facebook status feed Twitterfeed is already using to tweet). For this, I chose delicious (now that it's back from the dead). Since I use Chrome, I simply had to install the delicious chrome extension and remember to make use of it instead of my previous "share to Facebook" bookmarklet. Once I had that in place, I could get an RSS feed of my links.

I took this RSS feed and again created another feed in Twitterfeed (this is turning out to be quite the tool!). This time around, under the Advanced Settings I set up it so that the Post Content was "description only" and that the "Post Link" checkbox was checked (since you want to link to the link you're sharing). I chose the "description only" option for the Post Content because I want the tweet and Facebook status sent to be my comments about the link, not the title of the link. If you would rather have the title of the link be what is sent, use "title only" since the title in this feed is the link's title. If you want both the link's title and your comments, select "title and description".

Now when I want to share a link to both Twitter and Facebook I click the chrome extension and, as shown in the screenshot below, I just add into the Notes field what I want to show up as Facebook status and, slightly later, as a tweet. Once I adjusted to sharing links in this manner, it was a perfect way of sending links to both platforms.

This covers just about all of the content that I want to be able to share across Twitter and Facebook. The only thing that it leaves out is sharing photos. I could use Flickr and then use Twitterfeed to make updates about when I have new photos, but Flickr is limiting and that doesn't get the photos into Facebook where I can tag friends. Ideally, I want to be able to post photos to Facebook and then have some type of tool to tweet about it, but for the time being I'll simply have to do a separate tweet if I want to let people know I have photos up on Facebook.

I know this seems like a pretty convoluted process, but now that I've got it figured out it's not all that bad and definitely is much better than remembering to post about things in multiple systems. I blog once. I make a status update once. I share a link once. Yet it goes to both systems... as long as I follow my scheme. If you have a more or less convoluted way of doing things, I'm all ears!