Cambridge Business Association
Competency-Based Performance Reviews
Book

Competency-Based Performance Reviews

How to Perform Employee Evaluations the Fortune 500 Way

Robin Kessler
Career Press, 2008
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Editorial Rating

6

Qualities

  • Applicable
  • Well Structured

Recommendation

Robin Kessler relays her experience with Fortune 500 performance-appraisal processes and teaches you how to do a better job of evaluating your staff members. She advocates focusing on how they work and the competencies they use to carry out their tasks. Her writing is clear and practical, if a tad repetitive. Each chapter concludes with useful Q&A sections about the main concepts. getAbstract gives Kessler high appraisal points for her information and thoroughness; no doubt those are the goals she set in advance.

Summary

Competency-Based Review Fundamentals

Even though organizations require different skills from their employees, executives somehow can always identify their best staff members. Top performance puts these workers at the head of the list. Their individual abilities, referred to as “competencies,” provide an appropriate basis for employee appraisals. Evaluating your employees according to the standards they use to do their work makes sense. While some organizations use different terms (success factors, attributes, values, dimensions), they all refer to measurable competencies.

Any given organization can depend upon a long list of competencies, though some items may be unique to particular industries. The 10 most often cited competencies are “achievement-results orientation, initiative, impact and influence, customer service orientation, interpersonal understanding, analytical thinking, conceptual thinking, information seeking and integrity.”

Competency-based reviews evaluate employees’ actual work throughout a specified time period, generally a year. The evaluation examines what employees did and how they did it, using the competencies that you are measuring. The ...

About the Author

Robin Kessler is president of a Houston human resources and career consulting firm. She uses her 20 years of teaching, consulting and coaching experience to help organizations improve their hiring and employee development efforts.

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