Everybody hates performance reviews. As much is not news to anyone.

More interesting is the lack of creativity in designing meaningful and effective alternatives. 

In this morning’s Wall Street Journal, Rachel Emma Silverman takes a look at the fading allure of this rigid, intimidating and counter-productive time-waster.

Teams need to be able to communicate about their work. Everyone needs to be able to give constructive and timely feedback to those with whom they work.

The problem with most performance evaluation processes is that they function exclusively as a top-down tool for ineffective leaders to communicate the negative feedback they didn’t have the courage or grace to communicate throughout the year.

Two major problems result. The climate of judgment and intimidation makes even the most competent employee reticent to be honest about their (more…)

Office workspace is shrinking. So observes Roger Vincent in Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times.

Vincent does his best to observe an insightful emerging trend, but I can’t help suspect a desperate cost-cutting ploy.

With the rapid embrace of mobile technology and the integrated lifestyles of the young emerging professional, the need for dedicated office real estate for each individual’s private usage may not be a valid starting assumption for planning purposes.

On the other hand, we must recognize that there exist leaders who consider employees an unfortunate and painfully necessary expense; and who upon any excuse whatsoever will eliminate, minimize and/or squeeze any outlay related to them.

One set of leaders observes the changing nature of work, communications, lifestyles, and office space and sees an opportunity to redesign workspace to make the office an even more useful, productive and appropriate source of resources.

The other set of leaders hears of these developments and discovers a source of excuses to use in their quest to squeeze as much as possible from every employee for as little as possible, whether or not it results in actual benefits to the bottom line.

Which type of leader are you? In one case, you stand to increase employee loyalty and company results designing office space around actual usage. In the other case you risk alienating the very people you need to succeed in your desperation to save a buck or two cutting wherever and whenever possible.

Read Vincent’s full article here.

Voracious reader friend Don Silver always has an eye out for what interests me. Clippings from Don is a column where I pass on some of these articles, stories and resources to you.

“Drop and give me 50 push-ups and 25 thank-you’s!”

If you’re looking for a new exercise routine, try gratitude.

Melinda Beck offers a wonderful peek at research demonstrating the health benefits of expressing appreciation and gratitude in the Wall Street Journal. (Click here for the full article.)

From her article, “Philosophers as far back as the ancient Greeks and Romans cited gratitude as an indispensable human virtue, but social scientists are just beginning to study how it develops and the effects it can have.”

She even suggests seven ideas for incorporating thanks into your lifestyle if regular gratitude feels like a stretch.

In our culture we experience much moral reasoning as a negative, coercive force to be resisted. To hear that we “should” be grateful or we “ought to” count our blessings like the imposition of someone else’s values upon our own instead of the wise experience of those who have gone before.

So we ignore the ancients whenever their advice annoys us. Until, that is, science corroborates their “knowledge.”

And so it is now with gratitude. Thankfully (pun unavoidably appropriate) science demonstrates specific and concrete health benefits to being thankful.

Read the full article. Begin your gratitude work-out today.

Voracious reader friend Don Silver always has an eye out for what interests me. Clippings from Don is a column where I pass on some of these articles, stories and resources to you.

One of the reasons Scott Adams is so funny is because the situations underlying his humor are so real.

His article in the weekend Wall Street Journal, “The Perfect Stimulus: Bad Management” is the perfect example.

If you want a good laugh as you absorb some entrepreneurial insights, then click on over to his article on why bad management is the cornerstone of the entrepreneurial spirit in this country.

You’ll enjoy great one-liners like, “The primary purpose of management is to kill any hope that staying in your current job will work out for you… Remember, only quitters can be winners, because you can’t do something great until first you quit doing something that isn’t.”

And my favorite, “I think we all understood that working in a cubicle and being managed by Satan’s learning-challenged little brother was not a recipe for happiness.”

Sometimes the only way to keep from crying about work is to laugh about it.

You know I’m here if you want to talk about your situation at work. If we haven’t met yet, sign up for a free 30-minute consultation about your hamster-brained boss.

Voracious reader friend Don Silver always has an eye out for what interests me. Clippings from Don is a column where I pass on some of these articles, stories and resources to you.

Elizabeth Bernstein in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal offers a pithy and insightful look at the growing practice of answering “yes-or-no” questions with a “maybe.”

I‘ve long interpreted “maybe” as a polite “no.” My experience in my circles has been there are only two answers people give, “yes” and “maybe.” But evidently there are as many definitions and uses of the word as there are socially indirect communicators.

After offering a variety of reasons why a person might respond to a question with an answer that is not an answer at all, Bernstein does a nice job of alerting us to awkward, insensitive and unhelpful impact our “maybe” has on the questioner.

While interesting to read the reasons (excuses?) people opt for the non-response of “maybe,”  the insight is small consolation. That’s like asking an abused spouse to be more understanding of why her or his spouse is so violent.

The person needing the counseling is the perpetrator not the victim.

This is where Bernstein’s insights about the negative impact of a “maybe” response are worth their weight in gold to the discerning reader. If a few more of us find more direct ways to communicate our situations, then the word, “maybe” wouldn’t have to do so much more work than it really can.

Take a look at the article here. How often do you find yourself using “maybe” as a response? How do you feel when you receive “maybe” as a response to your invitations?

On your side,

- Karl Edwards

Voracious reader friend Don Silver always has an eye out for what interests me. Clippings from Don is a column where I pass on some of these articles, stories and resources to you.