Get Your Team to Write Their Own Year-end Performance Reviews

I once had a boss who through sheer idleness and bloody mindedness asked me to write my own year-end performance review. This was a really shit brief. You can’t just write endless lists of strengths so you find yourself owning up to all sorts of flaws and failures, ones he would never have spotted given the modest amount of attention he paid anyone else but himself. I ended up getting the lowest pay rise in the department.

The best way to score the top performance review is to be a brown nosed sycophant. It is very hard for a boss to rate you poorly if you are quite clearly his biggest fan (I say ‘his’ not because of my normal chauvinism that assumes bosses are always blokes but because the minority of female bosses are not so easily duped).

Up Yours.

Watch out for the Bastard Barons

On this rare occasion I find myself agreeing with most of what Sherrington wrote about being a Group Marketing Director. Not that I ever actually got to be one myself – I was far too talented to be considered. You know what they say – those that can, do and those that can’t, move to head office. I was briefly in HQ I admit and did come across some really unpleasant Barons – bosses of the operating businesses who regard people from the centre as about as welcome as a turd in a swimming pool. I list them as one of the 10 types of people you have to watch out for in business. Check it out here.

Up yours, Stame