Self Evaluation And Improvement Plan: Fill & Download for Free

Open salaries mean everyone knows the salary of their colleagues.Self-defined salaries mean the employee can negotiate and rise (or lower :D) his salary.In UPTech, the IT company I co-founded, salaries are both open and self-defined.Everyone knows how much everyone gets paid. Everyone knows when someone rises his salary. And we don’t have any gossips or hidden unpleasure.We have a thing called Salary Reviews: when a team member feels he advanced in knowledge and deserves to earn more, he is doing the following:Writes a letter mentioning his progress and the salary he’d like to get.Selects a committee (4–5 people, who can evaluate his progress).The committee members fill out the survey about the candidate.Everyone is gathering for a meeting and they discuss the team members growth and improvement plan. And make a final decision.You can find out more about salary review process and the results in my blog post.

That’s the beauty of this exam, it always keeps you in check, and even the best of the best student himself doesn't know if he will clear the exam with a good rank or not.Why this uncertainty?The nature and pattern of the exam in itself are uncertain in nature. Every year, more than 10 lakh aspirants apply for the IAS exam, out of which only 50% appear for the Prelims exam. The Prelims exam is the diciest because every answer you attempt is like facing a yorker delivery in cricket. If you miss, it will hit the wickets and you have no option but to wait for the next match!If you have good command over basics then you can cross the cut-off mark border in Prelims exam. For that, you need a lot of effort and a smart way of approaching each answer.Then comes the Mains exam. It is majorly a descriptive-type exam, where you have to write answers to address the demand of UPSC within a stipulated word and time limit. These constraints are a huge challenge in Mains writing answers. In order to meet this demand, you need a lot of practice and command over your writing skills.Finally comes the Interview, only the board member of UPSC knows how they judged the individuals. Many a time, aspirants feel that they had a good interview with the board, but end up with a low score, and vice versa. All this depends on the way the interview panel judges your personality and evaluates whether you’re a good fit as a Civil Services officer or not.By now, you would have got a fair idea why UPSC civil services exam is uncertain in nature.How aspirants fail even after their hard work?To understand this better, I will now list some general aspects where most of the aspirants miss their chances even after all their hard work.1. At times, most of the aspirants don’t give importance to NCERT and completely avoid reading it.2. Most of the time is spent in reading and not practicing or taking mock exams to assess their preparation.3. Many a time, aspirants get overconfident once they clear Prelims exam and ignore answer writing practice.4. Not working on the weak areas of the preparation. For example, if you are scoring low marks in Ethics, then you need special attention in Ethics paper to improve your score and chances. Self-evaluation is most important in this case.5. Finally, in the interview, not being honest with themselves and not analysing their own profile well before the final interview.How to assure the UPSC selection?Hard work alone does not fetch desired results - you need to have regular self-evaluation and upgrade yourself to meet the demand of the exam.As you all know, UPSC doesn't follow the same trend, and every year they upgrade the quality of the questions and come up with high quality to surprise the aspirants.In order to achieve the UPSC selection, you should be like the ‘jack of all trades’, because one cannot master all the subject topics. But you should know your strengths and weaknesses every time.Keep one thing in mind, I want to see my name written in black ink in the final merit list, if your name didn’t appear that means you need improvement.Work smart than harder to achieve the desired result in UPSC exam.Wishing you the best!

Yes.There is this notion that "after giving regular frank feedback and having been put on performance improvement plans" that when an employee is finally fired that no one should be surprised. This is a pernicious misconception parroted by management books and HR training manuals, and in practice it is almost always untrue.As a manager, you should expect that especially in the cases where you have been giving an employee all chances and repeated feedback that they will be surprised when you fire them.Here is the reason why.Employees who you end up actually firing tend to be oblivious to their own poor performance, and lack the ability to self-gauge their own performance. Subsequently, they are unable to substantially improve, and this is why after "giving them all chances," you end up firing them.The problem with feedback delivery is that most poorly-performing employees don't know they are doing as poor a job as they really are (c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect) and moreover, think they are doing a lot better than they really are. Anything less than brutally negative feedback will be skewed positively in the employee's mind. Most managers will verbally "soften" their feedback by saying things like "you could be doing X better" or "you are doing great at Y but you need to improve at Z." (Again, these examples are often recommended in management books or in HR training courses) A poorly-performing employee will end up hearing "I'm probably doing X at 80%, so there's only 20% more that I could be doing, I'm probably pretty close" (when objectively they are at only 10% performance) or "I'm really great at Y! Z's not so great, but I'm great at Y!" (when Y is not that important, and sucking at Z is fatal). While it's easy to say that giving honest feedback is the manager's fault, in most cases all but the most sadistic managers will end up verbally softening negative feedback that needs to objectively demonstrate to an underperforming employee that they are performing at e.g. 10% where otherwise they are probably thinking they are near 80% - they know they're not as good as a top person on the team (i.e. 100%) but they think they are just a little bit behind. The worst person on the team never knows they are the worst person on the team[1].Then, after you put them on a performance plan, you are essentially communicating to them that you believe they aren't that bad and that they are just a few adjustments away from improving to an acceptable level. In some occasions this is true (e.g. where an employee temporarily lost focus or had some personal issues), but for the ones where you know you are going to end up firing them, performance improvement plans are just a thing required by HR to produce a paper trail - you already decided to fire them, and now HR is requiring that you write down all the ways they need to improve, and objectively show that they didn't do so by re-evaluating them a few weeks/months later. Most employees don't know this, and think they are going to improve on the plan. The ones who do know it will already start looking for another job and will most likely end up resigning before the plan completes, so you never end up firing them. Therefore, the remainder are exactly the ones who (1) don't know that you already consider them a lost cause and left on their own and (2) weren't able to improve sufficiently.Essentially:High-performing or otherwise competent employees are good enough at taking critical feedback, thus improving where necessary. Low-performing employees minimize criticism in their favor and don't improve, remaining low-performing.Employees who know they aren't improving during the "giving chances" process typically try to find another job and resigning before the end of the process so as to avoid the indignity of being fired. Employees who don't know this are the only ones who end up arriving at the "getting fired" part.The combination of this perverse set of circumstances and cognitive biases nearly ensures that when you fire the employee that it is a complete surprise. The whole notion of "no one should be surprised" is just an HR myth. The reality is that when you fire someone for underperformance, they will almost always be surprised.This misconception has a harmful effect especially on new/young managers, who learn this "no one should be surprised" myth from books or HR training personnel (I don't know why HR personnel insist on saying this when they must've sat in on hundreds of terminations in their career and witnessed exactly the opposite happening over and over) and subsequently, after doing everything correctly in the process leading up to firing someone, discover that the person reacts with abject surprise, and then conclude erroneously that they themselves must be terrible managers, thus undermining their confidence.-----[1] The problem here is that the ones who take "you could do a bit better at X" correctly are never the ones you end up firing - they are your high performers, because high performers habitually take even the tiniest potential criticisms and think, "OMG, I suck at X! I'd better work super super hard at getting better at it!" This is how they become high performers, by skewing all feedback worse - and thus holding themselves continually to a higher standard (incidentally, this is the flip side of the Dunning-Kruger effect). Low performers do the opposite - praise is exaggerated in their minds, and criticism is minimized, so they are never motivated to put in extreme efforts to improve.