In part 1 of this two-part post I covered the potential impacts of poor performance, the causes and your responsibilities as a manager. In part 2, I’ll be guiding you through a seven-step process to help you deal with a poor performer.
Tackling Poor Performance
Many businesses do have policies and procedures around performance management and I’m not suggesting you don’t follow them. However, I’ve found a more informal, coaching approach to improve performance works in the vast majority of cases. Only once this approach is exhausted would I move down a more formal approach and this is normally the exception rather than the rule.
1. Prepare
Before you engage in a meeting with your poor performer, ensure that you have a detailed understanding and examples of poor performance as well as the impact that this under performance has had on the team, your customers, the business, yourself and the individual. Also, think about examples of good performance and behaviour that the person has shown in the past.
By spending some time preparing for the meeting, you will have had a chance to gather your thoughts, examine the evidence, think about the evolution of the relationship and mentally frame the meeting in broad and flexible terms.
2. Set up a meeting with context
You should set up a meeting with at least a couple of days notice. You should be very clear in explaining exactly why you are arranging the meeting, that you will be discussing their recent performance and that you would like to have a discussion around how you can work on an improvement plan going forward.
To help your employee prepare for the meeting, you could suggest s/he gives some thought to a few questions, for example:
• How successfully do the two of us work together?
• How good are our communications and overall relationship?
• Which aspects of your job do you find easiest?
• Which are you most comfortable with?
• And which do you find most difficult?
• To what extent do I help you perform?
• Are there things I do that make life more difficult for you?
• Overall what can we do to improve your performance, my performance, our joint performance and our relationship?
The Performance Meeting
3. Agreement with your employee on the symptoms of the problem
It’s really important that you and your employee agree that there is a performance problem and agree the specific examples of when performance has been poor, the impacts that this has had and the importance of getting back on track. Try not to get into the why’s and wherefores at this stage. We’ll come to that. Just get agreement that behaviours or deliverables were not at the desired standard required for your team and business.
4. Understanding the causes of underperformance
Together, you and your colleague need to arrive at a common understanding of what might be causing the weak performance. This step assumes the person will be willing to participate in a genuine discussion of his/her strengths and weaknesses. Very few people will see themselves as perfect and in no need of any improvement. However, some people do overestimate the quality of their work performance and are unaware of their weaknesses. A major reason for this is likely to be that their previous managers have been reluctant to confront the employee’s shortcomings. In the absence of past negative feedback an employee could be genuinely shocked by your feedback and tempted to reject it as biased and personal.
It might be useful at this stage to review the answers to the preparation questions you gave them in step 2 to tease out some possible explanations. Ensure that you also point areas of performance or behaviours that are good, or have been in the past and spend some time on these also.
This stage of the process can be emotive. Keep calm and spend time working through the detail if necessary. Don’t forget that you already have agreement that there was poor performance. If you can’t agree on the why at this stage, you may need to move on to offering some suggestions on a way forward.
5. Creating and agreeing an Improvement Plan
Find out what motivates the individual: People are motivated by very different things. Find out what’s important to the individual and shape and ‘sell’ the development plan accordingly.
Fit development action plans to learning style: Different people learn in different ways and this should be considered when planning development. Understand which is the best learning strategy for that individual and shape the plan accordingly.
Focus on development priorities: Don’t overload people with too many things to focus on.
Use a range of development techniques: Development doesn’t solely result from attending training courses. The success of development efforts will depend upon picking the right blend of development activity for the individual. Good development plans draw on a combination of learning, practice and reinforcement.
Ensure that the plan has SMART Goals and by SMART, I mean:
S – specific, significant, stretching
M – measurable, meaningful, motivational
A – attainable, achievable, acceptable, action-oriented
R – realistic, relevant, reasonable, rewarding, results-oriented
T – time-based, timely, tangible, trackable
Ensure that the individual owns their plan: Getting them to come up with ideas and to actually write the development plan themselves will ensure that they buy-in to the plan and feel that it is their own.
Make sure the plan is documented – either fully during the meeting or an agreed skeleton is produced during the meeting and an agreement that plan will be delivered back the following day.
6. Create Confidence and Commitment
A good manager wants their people to succeed. This stage is all about building confidence in the person and inspiring them to improve, to develop themselves and to take the initiative. People with high levels of self-belief set themselves more demanding goals, show greater effort and persistence in trying to achieve, and cope better with stress and difficulties.
Put a lot of energy into encouraging the individual to develop themselves and improve. Spend some time making the individual believe they can turn their performance around. Offer structured support as part of the improvement plan, but tell them it’s their responsibility to deliver against it.
7. Follow up
You must follow up on the agreements made. You and individual will have agreed to make certain changes, perform certain actions and/or reach certain performance targets by a given date. The onus is on both of you to ensure maximum high quality communication occurs during the period of the agreement. Don’t wait until the end of the process to discuss progress. Ideally the agreed objectives will be specific enough and the communication process during the contract period effective enough that both parties will agree on the assessment of the outcomes.
By implementing timely follow-ups and encouragement throughout the process, you should start to see demonstrable improvement.
Should performance not improve during the process then you must then set the expectation of the consequences which would be a more formal process. Although this process was not part of your company’s formal process, the documentation produced and meeting notes would be able to used as evidence as part of most formal procedures.
You won’t always succeed in turning around poor performance, but by following these steps you will have given your poor performer every opportunity to turn performance around.
I hope you found this post useful. As always, I’ love to hear your thoughts and feedback.