Today I’m going to talk more about the Personal Progress Meeting (PPM). You may be wondering what the PPM covers. What do you talk about if you’re not talking specifically about their works items, or work in progress?
Here are some of the topics you can cover:
Current work issues – what’s working, what’s not working in their job and the jobs of others. What are their ideas for improvement and cost savings. What are your ideas and what does the direct report think of them.
High and low points of the past week – why were they frustrating or satisfying?
Personal and professional development – what are their long and short-term career goals. What are they doing about them and how can you, and the business, help.
Performance – what’s their overall evaluation of their own job performance. What do they think it is. What do you think it is. Why? How can it be improved?
This needs to be open, honest reality based conversation in which you both focus on the improvement and you avoid blame, including self-blame. It’s the perfect opportunity to apply the system first problem solving approach, the no-blame problem solving approach we’ve discussed previously. And to develop systems thinking for both the manager and the direct report.
You can use the PPM meeting time for periodic formal performance evaluations which tend more to be at the end of the first three months, or the probation period, and annual. Then you go into a lot more detail, and that’s another topic altogether. But when you do that, you dedicate the entire meeting to performance evaluation and these meetings can be high stress, high anxiety meetings with potential for emotionally driven reactions so your focus the meeting exclusively on the performance appraisal. You conduct it honestly, with respect and in an cooperative, not a blaming way. If you’ve been giving frequent performance feedback (as in the PPMs), in these meetings, there won’t be any surprises. Most of the corrections will have been made before the appraisal meeting so it will be much easier and stress free. Most of the potential for anxiety and emotion will have been avoided.
You can use this meeting for projects and personal development goals. The PPM meeting is a good time to track their progress in special projects, personal development work, professional development, ongoing efforts. For instance, if your direct report and the manager are developing a new system for the business based on their ideas, it’s a good time to talk about progress and set goals to achieve them by the next meeting.
You can talk about personal matters if it’s appropriate. If there are outside, personal issues in their life that have an impact on his or her job performance or moral, then they should be brought to light and discussed, but all in the context of getting the job done and with genuine concern and from the manager.
This is a place where you can talk about the strategic intent of the business. Everyone in the business should understand and be constantly aware of the strategic intent of the business, especially its goals and the business philosophies that shape it. PPM meetings are an excellent time to build and reinforce that awareness.
And there’s a whatever in the most positive sense of the word.
There’s really no limit to the topics for discussion in these meetings. Anything that bears on the business, the direct report’s job, his or her ability to get the right results, is fair game. That can cross the line between personal and professional concerns so be careful when probing personal issues to make sure that they are related to job performance and personal/professional development.
Join me next week for Part III when I discuss the Personal Progress Meeting (PPM) system.
Until then…
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