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SMART Objective Setting for Managers: A Roadmap by Irial O’Farrell

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SMART Objective Setting for Managers: A Roadmap by Irial O'Farrell

Objective-Setting season is fast approaching. There’s a knot in the pit of your stomach. As time ticks closer to having to set objectives with your team, you can feel the knot pulsing, getting bigger. It has to be done but what’s the point?

Unfortunately, this is how many managers feel about objective-setting. Often due to lack of training or through their negative experiences with their own manager. It often feels like a box-ticking exercise. It doesn’t have to be this way. Actively developing each team member has huge benefits, of the individual, the team, their manager, the company and clients.

SMART Objective Setting for Managers has been written specifically for managers. It sets out the relationship between job description and objectives. It deconstructs the SMART framework. It then works through practical examples of how to design objectives that will really deliver the desired outcomes. It focuses on both target-driven “what” objectives alongside behavioural “how” objectives. It also takes some time to explore both the employee’s perspective and the manager’s mindset, in relation to performance and their role.

Summaries and prompts, at the end of each chapter, recap on each chapter’s main points and allow you, the reader, to think about the points in relation to your own team. Free template downloads are also available, to help you apply the learning.

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The Ingenious, and the Colour of Life by J.Y. Sam

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The Ingenious, and the Colour of Life by J.Y. Sam

From a beguiling new voice in contemporary fiction comes an astonishing novel about a group of mysterious children with the power to change lives…

Ever since young Milly Bythaway can remember, she’s had to hide who she really is – dumbing down an extraordinary genius in order to blend into the background. 14-year-old Tai Jones has been abandoned by his mother and forced to live as a homeless wanderer, but the appearance of a stray cat helps him realise he has a special gift: he can see thoughts and emotions of others in stunningly beautiful colours. A gift that is both wonderful and awful.

When the teenagers are brought together by a mysterious old scientist for their own safety, they are told of a common and forgotten past. One of hidden experiments, and a missing family that they yearn to find. But they soon hear of the disappearance of another child, the youngest, and find they are in an impossible dilemma. Saving themselves will require facing their deepest fears and delving into the ugly truth of their past – only to uncover something hidden in the dark… But if they can muster the strength, it will bring about the most extraordinary and unexpected change. In the end, the children must work together, unleashing the full force of their intellect and genius, in an epic battle of the world’s greatest minds.

The Ingenious and the Colour of Life is J.Y. Sam’s beautiful and heart-rending debut – a story that explores the fragility of human nature, with a dash of science, and the natural world, engaging both mind and heart in an eclectic blend of genres.

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Shadow of Wolves by J.R. White

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Shadow of Wolves by J.R. White

A tortured gunfighter. A Navajo outcast. – And the Creature whose claws would stain the stones of the Mojave red.
Flush with raw silver and ruled by a baron with an iron fist, the tiny mining outpost of Shank’s Point is under siege by a sinister evil.
When the rising sun reveals the claw-torn bodies littered among the rocks, John Swift-Runner calls on his old friend, a vagabond gunfighter, to stand with him against the slaughter he knows will come.
But as their band of misfits hunts for the creature on the burning sands of the Mojave, they stumble into a generations old mystery that goes beyond shamanic curses and into the bloodstained pages of legend.
Can the killing be stopped?
And can a tortured gunman like Kit Barker – with a terrible secret of his own – prevail against something as savage and eternal as the Beast?

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A Murder for Christmas by P.C. James

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A Murder for Christmas by P.C. James

A Murder for Christmas is the third in the popular Miss Riddell Cozy Mysteries series.

Miss Riddell has returned to her parents’ home to nurse her sick mother. It’s Christmas 1962, northern England, and the worst winter for decades. If that isn’t bad enough, there’s a crime spree in the village, a forged will that will bring ruin to the neighborhood, and her first love, a roguish cousin, has just been murdered.

Can Miss Riddell solve the mysterious crime wave before she becomes one of its victims?

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