By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to help you continuously improve your skill sets. Reading time: 3:38

They’re off and pacing. The race horses explode out of the starting gate and head for the first turn: 16 horses jockeying for position.

What if your leadership skills were like those 16 different horses in the starting gate, each jockeying for position?

And what if you thought of your next annual review as if it were the finish line in a one-mile race. By the quarter-mile mark (in 90 days), you would have a pretty good idea just how skillfully you are leading all 16 different horses or just how woefully you are just along for the ride.

But of course your chances of winning the race, of performing well through the remaining 3/4 of a mile — throughout the remaining 9 months of completing your annual review — will depend on how well you anticipate and compensate for challenges ahead to your leadership skills and your ability to shore up your weaknesses and affirm your strengths literally on the run — in the heat of battle- and against vigorous countervailing interests.

Conduct a Quarterly PREVIEW

That’s why the most effective leaders conduct a QUARTERLY PREVIEW — more than simply an annual review — in evaluating their staffs’ skills on the job. Career Development then becomes a visionary process-an on-going race to a non-existent finish line- more than a punitive report card on a random calendar date 12 months away. (And how may “annual” reviews are conducted 3-6 months late? Too many.) Small wonder the word — career—stems from the French word for a race course. Continue reading →