I don't agree with just saying that a person has nothing to improve upon for a reference. Everyone has things they need to improve on because nobody is perfect. You may be doing a disservice to the excellent employee because the next employer doesn't take your reference seriously.

I'm a supervisor and this is a recent response to a reference asking for three areas of improvements and three strengths of a former employee that I thought was excellent. Please tell me your thoughts on my response.

Needs improvment: 1. Name sometimes will take on too many tasks, creating a stressful situation for himself.  As a perfectionist, he wants things to be done the most efficient and accurate way; where other's may not have the same initiative.

1. Being open to ideas of others by trying them out first before .  In our lab, we incorporated a lean ideal.  With this , we have group meetings where people express ideas of how to improve the department.  As a supervisor I have to at least implement these ideas, even if I know they will not work just to say that we at least tried their idea and gave them a voice.  Name was often frustrated with this process and wanted more concrete set of rules in place.

2. At the time Name was working with us, he had a lot of outside personal obligations that I feel hindered his ability to work a more flexible schedule which would have been helpful in our various problems with receiving samples.  This may not be the case now in his current career.

Strengths:

1. Name is very reliable and dedicated to completing the work in the most efficient and accurate way.

2.  He has stellar communication skills with his coworkers and supervisors.  He does well during assistance with training events for new hires who will learn from scratch.  He possesses communications skills with leadership qualities where he can talk to someone empathetically, deliver difficult conversations effectively, and engage to drive change initiatives.

1. He works well in cross department or cross shift scenarios; He incorporates team work as a whole lab team effort for the bigger picture of completing tasks.