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* Giving effective feedback
* Handling difficult messages
* Setting achievable goals and expectations
* Supporting other people's development
* Using acknowledgement and praise
* Dealing with issues as they arise and avoiding escalating problems
* Seeing things from other points of view
* Dealing with other people's and your feelings
* Dealing with difficult or 'tricky' people
* Building other people's confidence and morale (and your own)
* Setting effective boundaries
* Knowing what to do when the goal posts change

In our experience, Performance Management and Appraisals often tend to be business processes that are handled badly or avoided altogether. The very forum that can help people understand their roles within the company, be assessed on the quality of their work, and gain support, direction and encouragement, is often ignored or endured simply because the people doing the appraising/performance managing find it deeply uncomfortable and hard to do.

The idea of appraisals is a good on - a chance to review, assess, debrief and, generally, develop the skills and confidence of the person being appraised. Sadly, it often doesn't work that way. That's because most of the time, it's all about procedures and not about people. Let's face it, the best procedures in the world won't really be effective if the person holding the appraisal isn't handling it efficiently, professionally and with long-term care involved.

Indeed, most appraisals end up as 'tick the box' exercises that cause a great deal of anxiety on both sides, and once they're completed, they're not looked at again till the next time - in six months or a year hence. Difficult feedback is postponed or sugar-coated or presented in such a way that the appraisee ends up a puddle on the floor.

In order to avoid all that, our work on appraisals focuses on helping people develop their day-to-day performance management skills. Just teaching people how to run an appraisal session isn't really going to address the fact that it's what happens every day that gives the true picture of a person's overall accomplishments and capabilities. Indeed, our belief is that if you're not doing day-to-day performance management, you can't really give someone a worthwhile appraisal.

If you have an appraisal process in place that isn't giving you the results you need...

If you have people who avoid the day-to-day performance management that will ensure no one has a 'shock' when they come to their appraisal...

If you have people who need to sharpen up their performance management and appraisal skills...

If you want your people to feel well-supported and encouraged through their day to day management...

If you'd even like help devising an appraisal process that's right for your company...

...then having us create a Performance Management/Appraisal programme might be the very thing you need to help people feel valued but also to know what else they need to do to be of value to your organisation.

In our work on performance appraisals and performance management, we give people real and practical skills to help them become more effective managers so that by the time they have to carry out a formal appraisal it's far more a summary of an on-going process rather than a process driven exercise.

Which is why we call our work on appraisals: The Best Surprise Is No Surprise