Search Results for: performance appraisal

Performance Appraisal Systems “Don’t Meet Expectations”

November 26, 2012 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Across the corporate world, the annual performance appraisal system has been reduced to a perfunctory exercise to “do what HR needs and check-the-box,” and produce paperwork to weed out the laggards and reduce liability against discrimination lawsuits. So much so that one company I know recently distributed copies of the book “Perfect Phrases for Performance Reviews” to hundreds of its managers to help “use relevant phrases and standardize the vocabulary” and “ease the whole process.”

Empirical evidence suggests that, taken as a whole, the annual performance appraisal system has failed to “meet expectations.” It produces no durable improvements in employee behavior and seldom assists the employees meaningfully with career development. Nor does it have a discernible impact on organizational development. Thanks to a system that is highly subjective and easy to game, this annual ritual has become a stressful exercise for managers and employees alike.

At many companies, performance appraisals center too much on filling out forms. The actual performance appraisal meetings tend to be uncomfortable encounters for both managers and employees. Much time during these meetings is devoted to disputing the self-evaluations of employees, summoning up their failings, and defending the employee rankings previously determined by a “consensus” process administered by HR. Besides, during the ranking process, managers tend to overstate the accomplishments of their own employees and put down other employees—after all, managers do not want to incriminate themselves and admit failure in managing employees as successfully as their managerial peers might assert.

Core to this problem is that most managers fail to understand that employee performance management is about establishing relationships and ensuring effective communication about how employees, managers, teams, and organizations can succeed and create enduring value.

Performance management should not be limited to just once a year during the annual performance appraisal. Helping employees to reflect on their performance and learn from their mistakes, and coaching them should be part of the everyday interactions between employees and their managers. This way, the employees can solicit feedback promptly, know where they stand, and make small ongoing improvements. The managers do not have to wait until the appraisal time and then make an extraordinary attempt to convince their employees to correct themselves. The constant communication can eliminate any surprises for both the manager and the employee during the formal performance appraisal exercise.

As part of this informal practice, the managers can keep a diary on employee performance. Recording significant and relevant examples of an employee’s performance (achievements and shortcomings) can help the managers write objective performance summaries. In addition to diminishing the recency bias, the awareness that a manager might write up opinions may persuade an employee to pay attention.

For now, HR can develop a “Performance Improvement Plan” to overhaul the performance appraisal system and truly help improve individual and organizational performance.

More Ideas for Career Success

Four Questions for Employee Performance Appraisals

July 22, 2007 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Peter Drucker is widely regarded as the “Father of Modern Management,” and one of the most influential management philosophers of the modern era. In “The Effective Executive,” Peter Drucker advocates that a manager focus on an employee’s strengths when appraising his/her performance.

Four Questions for Performance Appraisals

Effective executives usually work out their own unique form of performance appraisal. It starts out with a statement of the major contributions expected from a person in his past and present positions and a record of his performance against these goals. Then it asks four questions:

What has he [or she] done well?

What, therefore, is he likely to be able to do well?

What does he have to learn or to acquire to be able to get the full benefit from his strength?

If I had a son or daughter, would I be willing to have him or her work under this person? If yes, why? If no, why?

Call for Action

Strong performance motivates outstanding performers. Therefore, managers must make it a priority to understand each employee’s motivation and strengths and provide objective, fair and consistent appreciation to keep him/her fully engaged.

Managers, however, often fail to realize the prospect of enhancing employee performance by targeting their efforts on each employee’s strengths. They often resort to deliberating over an employee’s shortcomings, and, thus attempt to develop abilities not inline with the employee’s strengths.

Address the above four questions when preparing the performance appraisal of an employee. These questions enable you, the manager, to reinforce the strengths of the employee and guide a career that focusses on his/her strengths.

Keeping a Diary on Employee Performance

December 8, 2006 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Blog reader Sasawat from Bangkok (Thailand) asks:

“I recently joined a multinational chemicals company that uses a performance appraisal system. I supervise seven engineers. To help me do their performance evaluations at the end of the year, should I maintain a diary to record their projects and actions?”

Most managers rely on employee performance in the period immediately preceding the performance evaluation deadline. Unfortunately, they do not weigh performance from throughout the year (or quarter, if their organizations use a quarterly review system.) Some employees exploit this behavior by slacking-off during most of the year and by shaping-up in the weeks before a performance evaluation is due.

Keeping a Diary on Employee Performance A log or a diary will help managers record employee projects and behaviors in one location. Clearly, recording significant and relevant examples of employee performance helps managers write objective performance summaries.

Recording events in a dairy every week, however, becomes overwhelming when you have seven employees. Instead, ask each employee to keep a diary of his/her achievements. Review this information with your employee once every week. Give regular, specific feedback, both affirmative and corrective. This ensures that you keep yourself informed of your employee’s work and demonstrates that you care about his/her current work and achievements.

When a performance evaluation is due, study the employee’s diary along with your notes, if any from your weekly meetings. You should not have to dig through your files or seek reports from various sources. You will have accumulated all the data you will need, in one place, to help you prepare for an effective performance evaluation statement and discussion.

You Can’t Serve Two Masters

February 6, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Learning to “serve two masters” and managing multiple supervisors is a vital skill in today’s work world. Organizations have increasingly embraced matrix structures, with “dashed line” reporting (you work under a supervisor who doesn’t do your performance reviews) and “solid line” reporting (the true boss who evaluates your performance.) Do your best to accommodate the latter, but don’t overlook the other(s.)

Further, with cross-functional teams, it’s common these days to have multiple team-based supervisors, each overseeing your work on different projects. If you’re not cautious, it’ll become all too easy for each supervisor to regard you as if you have no other commitments, and you can end up letting them both down.

The key to managing expectations at odds is insisting on boundaries. If you aren’t too careful, you could become totally overwhelmed—each boss isn’t mindful of what the other’s sending you. Each ends up pushing their own agendas regardless of what you already bear on your plate.

To resolve the two-boss dilemma and try to please everybody, take the initiative and get your bosses to cooperate and liaise regularly:

Create and maintain one master priority list of everything on your plate. Update it at the beginning of every week, and make sure both bosses have a copy. This should help each understand how any emergent task would jibe with the other items on your list.
When one boss drops an urgent task on your lap, refer to the master priority list and ask, “If you want me to do this, what is it you want me to take off the list because I also have three other deliverables due in the next few days.”
Establish a daily 5- or 10-minute standing coordination meeting (“scrum”) with all the bosses. In the meeting, point out your current and impending priorities. They can adjust their relative preferences for you.
Don’t be the “go-between” and agree to speak on behalf of one boss to the other—especially if they aren’t speaking to each other. There’s much ambiguity, and managing conflict can become a significant challenge for you.

Even if you have multiple supervisors whom you take direction from, you’re likely to have one boss who’s ultimately responsible for their career. This boss will judge your performance and decide about your compensation and promotions. Tell her about your double bind and see if she can work out an acceptable arrangement with her colleague.

Idea for Impact: Remember to maintain good relations with everybody you work with. Personnel changes are widespread and frequent in most companies, and you never know who’ll be your next boss. Don’t strain your relationships with the other.

Book Summary of Leigh Branham’s ‘The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave’

August 4, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Employee engagement and retention of top talent is a holy grail of people management—and nearly as hard to pin down.

Employees expect managers to be fair, pay fairly, listen, value opinions, relate, develop, challenge, demonstrate care, advance, and so on. But many employees don’t know when and how to voice their concerns, or negotiate for what they want.

All managers know that engaged employees are happier and more productive. Yet, managers and HR managers cannot simply make employee engagement “happen.”

In The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave, employee-retention expert Leigh Branham discusses how companies can tackle employee disengagement and retain their best and brightest people.

Using a copious amount of facts and figures from interviews and surveys, Branham explores seven reasons for employee disengagement. For each reason, Branham lists signs that managers need to keep their eyes open for, and shows how employers and employees could communicate and understand their mutual needs and desires.

“Some Quit and Leave … Others Quit and Stay”

According to Branham, employee disengagement—and eventual resignation—is not an event; rather, it is a plodding process of bitterness, discontent, and eventual withdrawal that can take weeks, months, or even years until the definite choice to resign happens. He lists the ten most common stimuli that trigger employee disengagement:

Poor management
Lack of career growth and advancement opportunity
Poor communications
Issues with pay and remuneration
Lack of recognition
Poor senior leadership
Lack of training
Excessive workload
Lack of tools and resources
Lack of teamwork

Branham claims to have synthesized some 20,700 employee-exit surveys and has identified four fundamental human needs (compare to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) that must be met by employers:

Employees need to feel proficient. They want to be matched to a job that aligns with their talents and their desire for a challenge.
Employees need to feel a sense of worth. They want to feel confident that their commitment and their efforts translate into meaningful contributions to their company’s mission. They desire to be recognized and rewarded appropriately.
Employees need to be trusted. They expect their employers to pay attention, and be honest and open in their communications.
Employees need to have hope. They want to be treated fairly, and given opportunities to grow their skills and advance their careers.

Why Employees Start Feeling Disconnected from Their Work

The core of The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave is a “how to” guide to address each of the seven reasons to enable a company to pursue the path to become an “employer of choice.”

Reason #1: The Job or Workplace Was Not as Expected. Many new hires join their companies with a wide range of misconceptions and unrealistic expectations. Some stay and adapt, others disengage and stay, and some others disengage and ultimately leave. Branham advocates creating realistic job descriptions, and open communications between managers and employees on achieving their mutual goals and expectations.

Reason #2: The Mismatch between Job and Person. Companies with strong reputations for selecting the right talent and keeping employees well matched with their jobs have a strong commitment to the continuous upgrading of talent. Managers can assign tasks so that employees can be more engaged through the use of their “motivated abilities.” Managers must keep an eye open opportunities to augment employees’ jobs by delegating tasks they might not have considered before.

Reason #3: Too Little Coaching and Feedback. Branham affirms that most managers do coaching and feedback merely as annual or biannual HR-required discussions that bind ambiguous targets to performance-ranking and pay scale. Managers must lead frequent, informal, on-the-job feedback conversations with employees. Branham identifies four principal themes that managers must address to make their performance management practice seem less controlling and more of a partnership:

“Where are we going as a company?”
“How are we going to get there?”
“How does the manager expect the employee to contribute?”
“How is the employee doing? What is going well? What are the key suggestions for improvement?”

Reason #4: Too Few Growth and Advancement Opportunities. Branham observes that most talented employees cannot pinpoint and articulate, and often underuse their greatest strengths. He encourages companies to provide self-assessment tools and career management training for all employees, enabling them to be the best they possibly can be. Most “employers of choice” have a strong mentoring culture. They communicate that employees must take the initiative in their own career development.

Reason #5: Feeling Devalued and Unrecognized. To Branham, many companies do not have a formal and informal culture of recognition because their managers are themselves too busy with their nominal responsibilities to pay adequate attention to employees’ performance. Or, they can’t discern between average and superior performance. He lists recommendations for competitive base- and variable-pay linked to achieving business goals. He reminds managers that employees are hungry to be listened to, and want their ideas sought and implemented.

Reason #6: Stress from Overwork and Work-life Imbalance. Branham observes that the relationships employees form with other employees is a glue that binds people to their workplaces. He encourages fostering social connectedness by assigning cross-functional team projects and organizing group outings.

Reason #7: Loss of Trust and Confidence in Senior Leaders. When senior leaders don’t back up pronouncements such as “people are our most important asset” with their actions, even mid-level managers begin to question the decisions and the actions of senior leaders. The result is a manifest lack of enthusiasm in the workplace, and in the rising complaints and questions about policies and practices. Leaders must set the tone for workplace culture and must back up their words with actions to discourage employee cynicism and disengagement.

Becoming an Engaged Leader is the Embodiment of What Leadership Means

Recommendation: Fast read Leigh Branham’s The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave. This book makes a great reading for managers and leaders who will need to scratch beneath the surface to recognize unhappy employees before it’s too late, and then engage their employees better and retain their top talent.

While many of the book’s themes may appear familiar, The 7 Hidden Reasons discuses many ideas and “engagement practices” in great specificity to help managers and leaders keep their antennae up for signs of bitterness and discontent, and correct before they lose their best and brightest people. This practical tome can also help employees discuss and resolve their needs and desires.

Developing a deep understanding of what causes employees to lose motivation, disengage, and leave cannot be ignored or overlooked. Managers and leaders who can resolve the divergence that employees feel between their personal values and the best interests of their businesses will gain immeasurably by having a highly engaged and productive workforce.

Book Summary of Nicholas Carlson’s ‘Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!’

January 10, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Over the holidays, I finished reading journalist Nicholas Carlson’s Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! This interesting book offers an account of Yahoo’s steady slide towards irrelevance and Marissa Mayer’s early tenure as CEO.

“Complex Monstrosity Built Without a Plan”

Carlson devotes the first third of the book to explaining Yahoo’s beleaguered history and how years of mismanagement and strategy negligence got Yahoo into the mess that Mayer inherited as CEO in 2012.

The second third is about Mayer and her brilliant career as employee number twenty at Google. In 2010, her career allegedly stalled because Mayer got sidelined after conflicts with other luminaries within Google. Relying broadly on anonymous sources, Carlson portrays Mayer’s intense nature and her personality contradictions: in public settings, Mayer is brainy, glamorous, confident, articulate, and approachable. However, in one-on-one settings, Mayer is a self-promoting, dismissive, calculating, tardy, inquisitorial individual who avoids eye contact. “There was nothing especially abhorrent or uncommon about Mayer’s behavior as an executive,” Carlson writes. “She was headstrong, confident, dismissive, self-promoting and clueless about how she sometimes hurt other people’s feelings. So were many of the most successful executives in the technology industry.”

The last third is devoted to Mayer’s initial efforts to turn Yahoo around. Within the first year at the helm as CEO, Mayer motivated Yahoo’s beleaguered workforce, launched the redesign of some of Yahoo’s major sites, and made acquisitions to make Yahoo relevant in the mobile, media, and social realms. Carlson also describes Mayer’s bad hiring decisions, habitual tardiness, tendency to micromanage, tone-deaf style of communication, and dogged devotion to establishing the universally-despised practice of tracking goals and stack-ranking employees.

Yahoo: The Fabled Legacy Internet Company on the Slide to Irrelevance

Anybody who follows the internet content industry understands that the principal question regarding the then-37-year-old Mayer’s recruitment as CEO was never whether she could save Yahoo. Rather, the question was whether Yahoo can be saved at all.

Yahoo has been a mess for a long time. For early consumers of the internet, Yahoo’s portal was the internet—from the mid-1990s until the early 2000s, Yahoo was the number-one gateway for early users of the internet who wanted to search, email, or consume news and other information. Then, Yahoo floundered as the likes of Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Twitter, and Microsoft redefined the consumer internet and content consumption. Yahoo’s successive managements struggled to identify Yahoo’s raison d’etre and failed to set it apart from the up-and-coming websites. Yahoo’s management also fumbled on opportunities to harness the popularity of Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Sports, and Yahoo Finance to get advertising revenues growing again.

Mayer’s Arrival Was Too Late for Yahoo

Mayer came to Yahoo with extraordinary credentials, drive, technical savvy, celebrity, and charisma. Her tenure was centered on answering the single question, “What is Yahoo? What should become of Yahoo?”

The odds of Mayer succeeding to revive Yahoo as an independent internet content company were very bleak right from the beginning, because Mayer took on an increasingly irrelevant business with very little actual or potential operating value—either as an internet content company or as a media company. Carlson appropriately concludes,

Ultimately, Yahoo suffers from the fact that the reason it ever succeeded in the first place was because it solved a global problem that lasted for only a moment. The early Internet was hard to use, and Yahoo made it easier. Yahoo was the Internet. Then the Internet was flooded with capital and infinite solutions for infinite problems, and the need for Yahoo faded. The company hasn’t found its purpose since—the thing it can do that no one else can.

Since the publication of the book in December 2014, Mayer has dedicated her leadership to selling Yahoo’s core internet businesses and its patent portfolio. Yahoo is expected to then convert itself into a shell company for its investments in Alibaba (15.5% economic interest) and Yahoo Japan (35.5%.)

Recommendation: As a fast read, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! is great. Beyond Nicholas Carlson’s gossipy narrative and his pejorative depiction of Mayer’s management style, readers of this page-turner will be interested in Yahoo leadership’s strategic and tactical missteps. Particularly fascinating are how Yahoo missed opportunities to buy Google and Facebook when they were mere startups, the rebuffing of an acquisition bid from Microsoft, a lack of strategic focus, the leadership skirmishes with activist investors, the revolving door at the CEO’s office, and an Asian-asset drama.

Advice for the First-Time Manager: Whom Should You Invest Your Time With?

August 23, 2016 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Before you were a manager, success was all about your individual performance. When you become a manager, success is all about growing your employees. It is about bringing out the best in people who work for you—making them smarter, pushing them to perform better, and advancing their professional development.

As a manager and a team-leader, your performance as an individual matters in the sense of how you cultivate your team’s efficacy and foster their self-confidence through coaching and feedback. Your success will be measured less by what you do and more from the reflected glory of your team.

Given a team to manage,

Don’t invest the same amount of time for each employee. Treat employees differently, based on their responsibilities, strengths, and their developmental needs. Do spend some time every week chatting with each employee. Then prioritize and invest more time with:

those who ask for your help.
those who need your help, but may not ask for it—especially those employees who may be struggling with some assignments because of their weaknesses.
those who are transitioning into their roles or may be experiencing changes.
those whose ideas and performance have the biggest impact to the organization—now or in the future.
those competent employees who understand the responsibility you’ve assigned them and the results expected. Especially with employees who need little help and direction getting things done, focus on ensuring that your expectations and priorities align with theirs.

Give your employees the freedom and responsibility to do their jobs. Set high standards and make them accountable for achieving the results.
Give your employees continuous, timely feedback: not just during the HR-required mid-year or end-of-year performance reviews. Thoughtfully use every meeting, design review, brainstorming, project closure, or client-presentation as a teaching moment.

Collegial Goal-Setting and Goal-Monitoring?

April 28, 2015 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

An article in The Economist (7-Mar-2015 Issue) mentions a new trend in setting and monitoring goals. The “Quantified Work” system lets employees collaborate with each other to set targets for their peers.

Apparently, this collegial system has improved performance and transparency at Google, Twitter, Intel, and Kroger, among other organizations. “Quantified Work” is a checks-and-balances system which allows peers to set and monitor goals for each other. This both enforces accountability and ensures that goals are neither too hard nor too easy.

Kris Duggan, CEO of BetterWorks, the Silicon Valley startup behind “Quantified Work,” argues, “The traditional once-a-year setting of employee goals and performance review is totally out of date. To really improve performance, goals need to be set more frequently, be more transparent to the rest of the company, and progress towards them measured more often.” Amen to that.

Interestingly, the article mentions that achieving 60–70% of the goals thus set is considered normal rather than a failure. The article also cautions that salary raises and bonuses should not be linked to these goals. I deduce that “Quantified Work” is more for collaborative task-and-deadline management than for meaningful employee performance assessment.

In my consulting practice, I have tested collaborative task management. It’s not as efficient as it purports to be: employees tend to get carried away and spend more time adding goals and checking performance than doing actual work.

The Trouble with Targets and Goals

March 17, 2015 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In a well-known 1992 Harvard Business Review article as well as a book on translating strategy into action, Robert Kaplan and David Norton explained the need for a “balanced scorecard.” They encouraged leaders to develop tools with which to monitor the performance of any organization. The authors explained, “Think of the balanced scorecard as the dials and indicators in an airplane cockpit. For the complex task of navigating and flying an airplane, pilots need detailed information about many aspects of the flight, like fuel level, airspeed, altitude, bearing, etc.”

Goals are effective apparatus—a persuasive system indicating what achievements matter the most to an organization. Well-defined objectives, expressed in terms of specific goals, often direct an organization’s performance, sharpen focus on the execution of the organization’s strategic and operative plans, and boost productivity.

In terms of an individual within a company, goal-setting is especially important as a way to provide ongoing and year-end feedback. You can give employees continuous input on their performance and motivate them by setting and monitoring targets.

Still, there are four things to look out for when setting and managing targets:

Some organizations get so overwhelmed with setting and meeting targets that managers tend to adopt whatever behaviors necessary to meet the goals set by their superiors.
Some organizations get carried away and set too many targets. While goals are beneficial, having more of them is not necessarily better. In fact, too many targets can lead to stress, muddled efforts, and organizational atrophy. In this instance, employees feel as if they’re being asked to throw darts in multiple directions all at once. Adding to the confusion, priorities can even conflict with one another—e.g. decreasing production cycle-time while not hiring more workers or buying more equipment. According to a 2011 study by consulting firm Booz (now named Strategy&), 64% of participating global executives reported facing too many conflicting priorities. The celebrated management consultant Peter Drucker famously advised his clients to pursue no more than two priorities at a time:

Develop your priorities and don’t have more than two. I don’t know anybody who can do three things at the same time and do them well. Do one task at a time or two tasks at a time. That’s it. OK, two works better for most. Most people need the change of pace. But, when you are finished with two jobs or reach the point where it’s futile, make the list again. Don’t go back to priority three. At that point, it’s obsolete.

Sometimes, organizations can be so eager to reach a target that they institute an overly aggressive system (unreasonable “stretch goals“) in an attempt to drive people to heroic levels of performance. Instead, it’s best to have goals that represent what senior management thinks ought to happen, not the contents of their wildest dreams.
When grading an employee’s performance depends heavily upon that individual meeting his targets (e.g. bonuses promised to salesmen who achieve certain revenue targets,) it can pit employee against employee. This tends to create an unhealthily competitive environment with colleagues scrambling over each other to get to the client or show off their achievements to management. Conflicts and rivalry between employees is one of the dominant criticisms of the individual performance rating system and the forced ranking system that many companies currently practice.

Idea for Impact: In goal-setting, less is more and simple is better. A few well-chosen, consequential targets and goals can sharpen an individual’s or an organization’s focus and boost productivity. Too many targets can lead to stress and even disaster.

How to Write a Job Description for Your Present Position — Part 1: Why

December 15, 2008 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Preamble

This article is the first in a series of three articles that describes how to get clarity about your present role in your organization and write an effective job description.

Jobs and Job Descriptions

Jobs are the fundamental building blocks of an organization; they evolve to fulfill essential functions of the organization. The organizational endeavor is, therefore, the sum total of the endeavors of individuals at their jobs. It stands to reason that each job needs to be structured and formally defined. A job description serves this purpose: it is a formal detailing of the specific duties of an employee, her responsibilities and span of control.

A job exists to realize the purpose of an organization. For this reason, a job description should focus upward—it should be written primarily to reflect a specific need of the organization. In other words, a job description, for the most part, should describe the role and not the employee that holds the job—not what she can do, should do or wishes to do in her role.

Who Should Write Job Descriptions

Job descriptions help the management examine the structure of an organization and ensure that all the necessary responsibilities are adequately covered. Ideally, therefore, jobs should be defined from the top.

Theoretically, a manager is the most knowledgeable about all the jobs he supervises. He should be responsible for defining and maintaining the job description. However, hardly a few managers are keen on writing effective job descriptions for their employees. Most managers tend to be cursory: they use generic templates provided by their Human Resources or Personnel departments, or, at best, maintain a longwinded list of an employee’s activities. A majority of job descriptions are vague, out-of-date, indistinct and therefore inadequate. Consequently, job descriptions are often ignored in several organizations.

Why You Should Write Your Job Description

One of reasons you may be dissatisfied with your job or performing poorly on the job is that you tend to perform your day-to-day tasks without any formal detailing of your role. In all probability, you are not completely certain of everything your manager expects of you and how you will be measured against these expectations. In other words, a formal job description may not exist for your job, or, if it does exist, it is badly out-of-date, imprecise and inaccurate.

As the job-holder, you are the best person to write a job description for your job since you have the most on-the-ground knowledge of your role. This assumes, of course, that you can develop or have previously developed a sound understanding of what your role requires of you in the context of the objectives of your organization, including those of your supervisor and immediate management.

Additional critical reasons that may lead you to write your job description include,

Redefinition: The nature of your role has changed due to redefinition of the nature of your business, restructuring, revisions to your organization’s objectives, or change in management or your supervisor-manager. Such changes may lead to a significant disparity between what you have done in the past and what may be expected of you in the new context.
Transition: When you are moving out of your job, you may consider helping your management recruit a proficient replacement by defining the exact nature of your current role and the skill sets or credentials desirable in potential candidates. A separate blog article will discuss how to identify and define desired characteristics in job candidates.
Measurement and Feedback: A job description can help setup a well-defined, consistent understanding of expectations and measures that form the bases of formal performance appraisals.
Promotion or Compensation Review: An exhaustive job description is indispensable to persuade management to assign more resources or responsibilities to you or appraise your role, job title, compensation, or benefits.

Most significantly, you can use this opportunity to precisely define your role, correlate what you do with what is expected of you in your role, and ensure ownership and job satisfaction. This sense of better control and direction will translate to stronger motivation at work.