A common debate leadership teams have when setting Rocks is deciding whether something that is your day job can be a Rock—for example, things such as training, sales activity, reducing the AR balance, establishing the budget for the year, or employee reviews.

“… I once had a pet pine squirrel named Omar who lived in the cotton secret and springy dark of our old green davenport; Omar knew that davenport; he knew from the Inside what I only sat on from the Out, and trusted his knowledge to keep him from being squashed by my ignorance. He survived until a red plaid blanket – spread to camouflage the worn-out Outside – confused him so he lost faith in his familiarity with the In. Instead of trying to incorporate a plaid exterior into the scheme of his world he moved to the rainspout at the back of the house and was drowned in the first fall shower, probably still blaming that blanket: damn this world that just won’t hold still for us!” Ken Kesey, “Sometimes a Great Notion”

Jay Shepard’s Gruntled Employees post of 12/31/11 calls the Annual Employee Performance Reviews The Dumbest Managerial Tool Ever. He offers four compelling arguments for this point of view. They mostly center around the reviews not being done in an appropriate time frame – when praising or criticizing employees behavior, its best done when both you and the employee will remember the incident. We couldn’t agree more. Just remember to praise in public and criticize privately.

I was in a Starbucks this week and noticed Howard Schultz’s book Onward. He is the CEO of Starbucks, and the book’s subtitle, How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul, prompted the idea to send you this video.

This has come up several times in sessions that I’ve led over the past few months. Reflecting back on why goals or rocks weren’t achieved during the prior year or quarter, leaders have realized that they, their boss or peers wasted time doing “dumb stuff”. What was so powerful in these sessions was that leaders were willing to call each other out.