3 Questions for Your Weekly Review
September 11, 2007 by Phil Gerbyshak
Filed under Business
If you’re a manager, you should be having weekly meetings with each person on your team. Why? To make it easier for you to do your job as a manager by having documentation of what’s happened and what expectations are for what’s about to happen.
So how can you do this without spending a lot of time doing it? Ask your team to send you an e-mail with the answers to these 3 questions each week before they show up for their weekly meeting. Use this format, and you’ll be able to easily find the notes, and be able to set up a rule so they automatically go to a folder so you don’t have to file them.
Subject Line: Weekly Review for <insert associate name>: week ending September 14th, 2007
3 questions with my answers:
- What did I do well?
- What needs improvement?
- What am I working on next?
You can also use this if you want to manage up, and tell your boss what’s going on in your world, without being micromanaged or feeling like you’re tooting your own horn.
The key to this is to be specific in each step. If you got praise for something, put that in what you did well. If you didn’t do something so well, put this on your weekly review, and talk about how you can make it better for next time.
Why is this so valuable, besides for this making it easy for you to do mid-year and year end reviews? Two words:
No surprises.
What about you? What questions would YOU ask for your weekly review? You do weekly reviews, don’t you?
[Phil Gerbyshak has been leading people since he was 12 years old. In the last 4 years, he has led a team of IT help desk professionals. Without his weekly reviews with his team and with his manager, his managing life would be much more difficult.]
My best boss only used to ask us each what our Top 3 things were this week.
I suppose that the intention was that, after a while, things would die down and we’d be able to plan our projects a bit more fluently and sedately… but life doesn’t work like that – at least not in this company – so this turned out to be a pretty good method of Continual Forest Fire Fighting Engineering.
That’s a great idea Phil. Especially the first question where you ask what has gone well – that’s crucial! Otherwise these kinds of meetings tend to end up as gripe sessions or as endless repetitions of “why didn’t this get done on time?”
I just want to add a fourth question:
4: What can I as a manager do to make your life easier?
I appreciate how you keep things simple and regular as a manager. I think it is also important to start with the foundation of the person’s strrengths.
Reading this I immediately thought back to a podcast series on weekly one-on-one’s by manager-tools. This is in their basics series: http://www.manager-tools.com/manager-tools-basics.
Keep up the great posts, emiel
Brent – Too bad that didn’t work out. Not sure what happened, though it sounds like a bit of a lack of commitment on all parts. Or a lack of staff. Sorry to hear that no matter what happened.
Alex – Great 4th question! Thanks for adding it. I agree completely.
And no sense pointing fingers. That NEVER helps anything.
David – Simple is often most effective, so I’m glad this was simple enough. Strengths based is one of my keys in my life. Buckingham’s book revolutionized my management life.
Emiel – Thanks for the reminders on the basics of manager tools. I wrote about that a while back, and it’s nice to keep that out in front. Thank you for stopping by.