Improve Employee Performance Idea 110 – April 6, 2010: Let Employees Identify Needed Skills

When you think about the skills your employees need, allow them to create a “specialized” list of skills they believe would help them do a better job.  To do this, you might:

1. First, create a “generalized” list of skills that fall into a separate area; for example communication.

2. Second, present this list to your employee and explain that these are some general communication skills that are important for effective communication on the job.

3. Third, ask your employee to select from the list any that he or she believes would be useful for doing a good job.

You will then be in a position to move forward with discussions about acquiring new skills, enhancing current skills, and applying needed skills.

KEY REMINDER:  To improve employee performance, you have to conduct effective performance discussions, give effective performance feedback, reinforce employee performance, and use effective performance phrases to write effective performance appraisals.
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Barbara Brown, Ph.D. shows managers how to improve employee performance by linking performance to results. She publishes handbooks that contain phrases for discussing performance and for writing appraisals. Dr. Brown also provides training and consulting. Visit www.LinkToResults.net.