Andrew Gabriel wrote:
In ,
Tim writes:
On 22/04/15 02:24, MM wrote:

Gonna have another stab at sleeping now...

Is the right answer

Having read this sub-thread, I feel very lucky to have had a number of
very good managers in my career (not all, but many of them), and I believe
I have been a good manager myself, learning from the better ones, and also
from the bad ones (what not to do;-).

A good manager is a leader whose job is to get the best from the team,
understanding what drives each team member, what hinders them, and as
far as is possible/reasonable, pushing the former and removing the latter.
As a manager, you should be on sufficently familiar terms that your staff
can share their issues with you, and you should know what their longer
term aims are, and providing it matches the company's direction, you can
help them move towards those, even if it means losing someone good from
your team to another role in the company (which is always better than
losing them to a competitor).

If you get an unexpected resignation, then you weren't working well enough
with that staff member. Equally, if you get to an appraisal, there shouldn't
be any surprises on either side - everything mentioned should have been
covered in regular conversations and/or regular 1-2-1s in the period since
the last appraisal. It's also where the staff member gets a commitment
from the company on things like training needed over the following year.

Your manager rarely has complete control of compensation (pay, bonuses,
etc), and the appraisal is used to justify compensation changes higher up
the management and to HR, where they are not going to know the staff member
as well, if at all. (It's also necessary to protect companies from
discrimination cases which staff might bring if they think they have been
unfairly treated, if this was not the case.)

Companies which take management leadership seriously will usually have some
type of 360 degree appraisal system, where the staff also appraise their
manager via some type of anonymous or protected feedback (and sometimes
also their manager's manager). A poor manager/leader can seriously reduce
the productivity of whole teams, and that is an enormous unnecessary cost
for a company - indeed it is often the cause for a company to fail.


Someone once asked me how I determined if a salesman was any good. I
replied, put him on the road for a month and you will know!

IME appraisals are not worth the hot air they are written on. They're
about as reliable as 5 year business plans.