You will find that when the training process goes well, it is nothing short of exhilarating. And even this exhilaration is dwarfed by the warm feeling you’ll get when you see a subordinate practice something you have taught him.

Guess who will have learned most from the course? You. The crispness that developing it gave to your understanding of your own work is likely in itself to have made the effort extremely worthwhile.

If this is your first time teaching, you’ll discover a few interesting things: • Training is hard work. Preparing lectures and getting yourself ready to handle all the questions thrown at you is difficult.

There is another reason that you and only you can fill the role of the teacher to your subordinates. Training must be done by a person who represents a suitable role model. Proxies, no matter how well versed they might be in the subject matter, cannot assume that role. The person standing in front of the class should be seen as a believable,

Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform. Consider for a moment the possibility of your putting on a series of four lectures for members of your department. Let’s count on three hours of preparation for each hour of course time—twelve hours of work in total. Say that you have ten students in your

Then your subordinate may say he’s accepted a job somewhere else and can’t back out. You have to make him quit again. You say he’s really made two commitments: first to a potential employer he only vaguely knows, and second to you, his present employer. And commitments he has made to the people he has been working with daily are far stronger than

To this day I haven’t a clue about why I didn’t spot the candidate’s considerable flaws. So in the end careful interviewing doesn’t guarantee you anything, it merely increases your odds of getting lucky.

If performance appraisal is difficult, interviewing is just about impossible. The fact is, we managers have no choice but to perform the interview, no matter how hard it is. But we must realize that the risks of failure are high.

Preparing and delivering a performance assessment is one of the hardest tasks you’ll have to perform as a manager.