Competency-Based Performance Reviews

Managers working in today’s organizations often focus more on results than on the people who achieve those results. But regularly evaluating the performance of your employees is critical to improving the efficiency and output of your organization. Performance reviews have changed significantly in the past few years. Companies today are looking for the key characteristics, known as competencies, that help the most successful people in their field to be so successful. Managers and employees need to focus on those competencies, especially during performance review discussions. Competency-Based Performance Reviews offers you a new and more effective way to handle performance reviews and to coach your employees to emphasize the knowledge, skills, and abilities that they have and the organization needs. Most sophisticated U.S. and international employers are using competency-based systems to select, interview, and evaluate the performance of employees. Fortune 500 corporations such as American Express, Anheuser Busch, Coca-Cola, Disney, Federal Express, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer are all looking for specific competencies. This book will give you the guidance you need to:

• — Perform competency-based reviews on your employees.
• — Help your team get the recognition they deserve in division meetings by providing the evidence to justify higher performance rankings.
• — Develop your own competencies—and those of your employees.
• — Coach employees to recognize competency-based accomplishments and advocate for themselves throughout the year.
• — Write smarter, targeted competency-based accomplishment statements to use on performance review forms.

By putting these competency-based performance reviews into practice, managers can strengthen their organziations, their careers, as well as the careers of their employees. Competency-Based Performance Reviews includes sample phrases to use on reviews, as well as sample accomplishment statements to guide employees to improving and writing their own.

Robin Kessler is currently president of The Interview Coach, a human resources and career consulting firm in Houston, Texas. She has more than 20 years' experience improving interviews, resumes, presentations, and organization communications as a human resources professional, consultant, career coach, and adjunct professor. Kessler is author of Competency-Based Interviews and Competency-Based Resumes, the first books to teach people to write their resumes and prepare for interviews considering the competencies employers are looking for. She has trained managers and employees to write effective, competency-based statements on their performance reviews and to communicate about competency-based accomplishments. She has her BA and MBA from Northwestern University.