As a manager, you aren’t truly successful unless your employees are as well. Helping them establish compelling, actionable performance goals is the first and most important step, and this handbook is there to lend a hand.

A follow-up to the bestselling 2600 Phrases for Effective Performance Reviews, HR executive Paul Falcone provides you with ready-to-use performance goals organized by the characteristics and core competencies used most often in the appraisal process. From attendance and attitude to teamwork and time management, managers will find the language they need to inspire exceptional results.

In 2600 Phrases for Setting Effective Performance Goals, Falcone shows you how to:

Build on individuals’ strengths rather than compensating for their weaknesses.
Help your employees feel engaged and self-motivated.
Develop an “accomplishment mentality” that encourages your staff to constantly reinvent themselves based on the organization’s needs.
Encourage retention by developing realistic, customized goals that prepare them for their next career move.
Determine appropriate follow-up intervals and measurable benchmarks to determine progress throughout the year.

Twelve-year-old Fee is a shy Korean-American boy growing up in Maine whose powerful soprano voice wins him a place as section leader of the first sopranos in his local boys choir. But when, on a retreat, Fee discovers how the director treats the boys he makes section leader, he is so ashamed, he says nothing of the abuse, not even when Peter, Fee’s best friend, is in line to be next. The director is eventually arrested, and Fee tries to forgive himself for his silence. But when Peter takes his own life, Fee blames only himself.

Years later, after he has carefully pieced a new life together, Fee takes a job at a private school near his hometown. There he meets a young student, Arden, who, to his shock, is the picture of Peter—and the son of his old choir director.

From one of the finest nature writers at work in America today-a lyrical, dramatic, illuminating tour of the hidden domain of wild animals.

Whether recalling the experience of being chased through the Grand Canyon by a bighorn sheep, swimming with sharks off the coast of British Columbia, watching a peregrine falcon perform acrobatic stunts at 200 miles per hour, or engaging in a tense face-off with a mountain lion near a desert waterhole, Craig Childs captures the moment so vividly that he puts the reader in his boots.

Each of the forty brief, compelling narratives in The Animal Dialogs focuses on the author’s own encounter with a particular species and is replete with astonishing facts about the species’ behavior, habitat, breeding, and lifespan. But the glory of each essay lies in Childs’s ability to portray the sometimes brutal beauty of the wilderness, to capture the individual essence of wild creatures, to transport the reader beyond the human realm and deep inside the animal kingdom

Ancient Greece: A place where the gods hold mortal life cheap, mere playthings to amuse, delight, and abuse at their will.

But those puny mortals are not wholly devoid of power and at the core of their fabulous city-states lies the Labyrinth, where they can shape the powers of the heavens to their own design. When Theseus entered the Labyrinth and came away with the prize of freedom and his beloved Adrianne, Mistress of the Labyrinth, his future seemed assured… Until he abandoned her for the unforgivable sin of bearing him only a daughter, and the world seemed to change. From that day forward, all the Labyrinths in the ancient world started to decay. It slowly became clear that power was fading from the city-states.

Was it the natural decline that comes to all cultures or was it because the power of the Labyrinth had been corrupted by a woman spurned?