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July 23, 2004

Are You Committed?

I had my midterm "checkpoint" review this morning.

Microsoft has a very defined HR process. If you're a full-time employee, you set goals (or, in Microsoft parlance, "commitments") with your manager every year. These goals are, ideally, SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Reasonable, and Time-bound) (although the specific word choices seem to deviate from org to org), which means that you're clear about what you're going to accomplish and others have a way of determining if you've hit - or exceeded - your targets.

Microsoft people are unbelievably open about their commitments. Steve Ballmer has talked about his commitments to Microsoft's Board of Directors to the entire company; Anoop Gupta, who runs the Real Time Collaboaration division here in Office (the group I'm working for) led a 200-person all-hands meeting where he effectivey gave a recap of of his own recent performance review. If you stop and think a moment, this is pretty incredible -- here's a very senior manager, walking through what he accomplished (or didn't) with all his people. Including the interns.

Pretty transparent, huh?

The annual cycle, SMART goals and focus on transparency means that Microsoft people tend to be very candid about strengths and weaknesses. I was delighted with the feedback I received from my manager, both because it was positive (they didn't, for instance, tell me to pack up my stuff and get out of the building by 2 PM) and because I felt that the areas he identified for improvement were right on. I also appreciated that interns are so carefully managed: we're here for just 12 weeks, but we get a goal-setting session (when we arrive), a checkpoint review (at the midpoint, which was this morning), and an exit review (for me, that's late August/early September). It all adds up to a 'guided' path, where the interns are free to focus on learning and doing their jobs. There's very little chance that we're going to be left on our own long enough to cause problems.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at July 23, 2004 10:53 AM. Posted to MSFT.

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