Tuesday, 13 April 2010

Performance Management

Performance management in Bucks university
The university as a whole measure students performance by making them do coursework as well as end of term exams. The exams which are set for the students can measure how well they have performed during the year by seeing how their results. If the lecturers have done their job properly by teaching the students everything according to the education board and the students have paid attention during class as well as doing their own research, they will get a decent grade. The teachers at the university can predict which students will do well in the course by seeing how well they take part during each lesson as well as measuring their attendance.
At Bucks university all the lecturers have different methods and ways to manage their students performances during the lesson and also over the year. Mary Simpson is our lecturer for the "People and Organisation" module and she has her ways of measuring our performances. We have one lecture every week with Mary and during that 3 hours lesson we go through a topic which is presented by her on PowerPoint. In order to make sure that we have taken everything in, she gives us a set of activities to complete which relates to the topic that she covered during class. As part of our course work we have to do blogs on all the topics that we have covered during the lecture and these blogs are worth 60% of our final grade. Doing these blogs is a good method of measuring our performance because as this is part of our coursework, most of the students will pay attention during the lecture and also revisit the PowerPoint slides as it will help us do the blogs. The way Mary measures our performance is reading our blogs every week and then she provides us some feedback which is given as a comment underneath the blogs. The feedback includes comments on how to improve the blog further and the way she measure our performance is by re visiting the blogs to see if we have taken in her information and used it within the blog. We also did another coursework which was done in teams of three or four students. The way she measured our performance during that piece of coursework is by having a small interview with each team and we had to present all the work that we have done so far. She gave us some useful feedback on what to include and also how to improve the work that we have already done. When we hand a piece of coursework to Mary, she marks the pieces and then she hands it back to us with a feedback sheet on it. On the feedback sheet she writes what she thought was good about the piece as well as comments on how we could have done it better and she will also write how we can improve future coursework.
My personal tutor contributes by having one to one interviews with the students and during these interviews she gives us advice on how to improve our future coursework. Even though we don't see one personal tutor as much, the students can feel free to visit her office any time they want and get advice or help from her.

Skills required to be an effective mentor
A mentor is someone who encourages and inspires different individuals in certain areas where they might need help in. If a person has a personal mentor, they can ask any questions if they have any doubts about anything and they can also seek professional advice. Students and people who have their own business tend to be the most common people who have mentors and the reason for this is because they might need special help to get some where in life and they might want to aim higher (ibm.mentorplace 2010)
A lot of entrepreneurs have their own mentors to tune up their business skills and due to the help of their professional mentors, they have found success within their business. If the business people have set some specific goals which they would like to achieve in the future, the mentors can help achieve them by giving them good guidance and support during their journey to success. In order to become a good mentor there are some key skills required and the main one is to be able to communicate properly using encouraging and inspiring words. Mentors must be patient whilst working with people because not everyone will get everything straight away. Another reason why they must be patient as well as being good problem solvers is because mentors will face straight forward as well as difficult challenges everyday. Having good listening skills is also an important skills required from the mentor as they will have to listen to all the problems that the person being mentors has. If they listen carefully to every detail that is provided from the mentored, the mentor can respond more better which means that he/she will come up with good solutions to the problem. It will take some time in order for the students or business people to be able to accomplish certain things because it might be all new to them. In order for the mentors to be able to teach and guide the people they are helping, they have to interact with them as well as getting their full trust so people can open up to them and learn things more quicker. Mentors need to be quick at thinking because if they use one method to help out people, but it doesn't seem to work, the mentors have to be able to come up with another idea or method that people will find more easier to understand and follow. If they get stuck and are out of ideas, it is more likely that they will be fired due to the fact that they have failed to deliver good guidance and support. Mentors must not do all the work such as coming up with ideas of how to achieve certain goals etc. If they do all the thinking, than the person who is getting mentored will not use their brain and knowledge but will depend everything on the mentor. For this reason the mentor must give the mentored the opportunity to think for them selves and come up with brief ideas which can be developed further by the mentor. In order to be a good mentor, it is important that they receive full training by professionals because when people search for a new mentor, they will expect to find experienced and qualified mentors (business.timeonline 2008)

My mentor at primary school

I moved from Denmark when I was in year five and during that time I found it very difficult to learn and pick up the language as well as making friends. Due to the fact that I couldn't really speak to anyone as I only knew how to speak danish, it was difficult for me to approach people. To help me learn the language more quicker my form tutor assigned me with a mentor who also knew how to speak danish. My mentor was a very good listener and she helped me with any problems that I faced at school which included help with my homework and also translating the language. She has mentored plenty of students over the years and therefore had plenty of experience, but I was her first foreign student that she had ever mentored which made things a lot challenging for her. In year five all the students were preparing for their year six exams, so my teacher set me some targets that she wanted me to achieve by the end of year six. My mentor went through the targets and we kept on revisiting them until they all stuck in my head and so I knew what I was working towards. She faced some tough challenges during her time mentoring me as she found it difficult to teach the whole syllabus to me. She came up with alternatives by creating pictures and reading plenty of books with me. As I reached to year six, my mentor went through lots of exam papers and as my English gradually got better, I made more friends. It turned out that my mentor has made my life a lot easier when I started school in the UK and we both had a really good relationship which meant that I could talk about anything with her. I managed to achieve my targets all thanks to my mentor and therefore she has made an impact in my life. I don't think that I would have gone really far without her assistance and therefore I am very great full to her.

Conclusion

Managing performance is important in all aspects because if the performance is not properly monitored or managed, students, employees, or employers will not know how well they are doing and therefore it will be harder for them to continue working. If their performance isn't good and no one is letting them know about it or giving them feedback on how to improve their performance, they will just continue to perform the way they do which is not good for them as well as the outcome they produce. There are many ways of monitoring performance, but it is important to select the right one depending on the type of performance people are trying to manage.
References


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