Question

1. How do you think an engineering manager should make an employee aware that their performance is not at the level expected? Do you feel you should have a different approach for your technical/professional employees than you have for other employees?

2. Is there such a thing as "positive criticism"? Give an example to support your answer.

3. How does the application of the "golden rule" relate to the concept of respect? Be specific.

4. Write a "code of personal ethics" which you feel you should follow.

5. Look up the published ethical code of conduct for a professional society (such as ASME, NSPE, IEEE, ASCM, etc.) or a civic organization (Rotary, Kiwanis, etc.). How do these tenets match with your own personal ethical code?

Answer 1

1. The best way to approach this is to ask the employee to complete a performance appraisal form clearly defining his work contributions and his areas of development. When he completes his self appraisal form he will be in a position to clearly state what contributions he has done and what achievements he has had and also mention an overall review of his work for the last 6 months. Then you can use the performance appraisal form to discuss his achievements and contributions and compare it to his peers. This will give you a clear way to indicate that his performance is not up to the mark and hence you are coming up with a plan of action to improve his performance and then review the same in the coming months.

2. Performance feedback are related to your key responsibility areas or targets that you need to achieve. Hence rather than having different approaches for technical and non-technical employees; one should focus on cleary defining the performance measurement critieria and then review the performance of their employees against each deliverable.

3. Yes, there is such a thing called as "Positive Criticism". For example: If you appear for an interview and fail to clear it. Your can ask the interviewer for a constructive feedback and how to improve yourself going forward.

4. "Golden rule of respect": The "golden rule" suggests that if you want others to treat you with respect; you should be willing to treat them with the same level of respect too. Be respectful and likewise earn respect from other people. This also simply means that you have to first earn your respect to be respectful and the only way to do that is by giving respect to other people around you.

5. My four Personal Code of Ethics are as follows:

5a. Honesty and Integrity

5b. Build trustworthy relationships

5c. Mutual Respect

5d. Self Discipline

6. The civic organisation Rotary has many ethical code of conduct. The first one says, " Exemplify the core value of intergrity in all behaviors and activity", which defintely resonates with my first personal code of ethics.  All my personal code of ethics display or center around respect and a positive personal behavior towards the society. Hence, it is very similar to Rotary's core values which reflects how we need to act and behave towards the community we belong to in general. Displaying a positive and constructive attitude towards other people and the community is the key philosophy of Rotary's code of ethics and the same matches with my overall personal code of ethics. Eventually people will not remember you for what you say to them but how you treated them and made them felt.