One of the hardest conversations you’ll ever have as a manager is how to confront an employee about less than stellar performance. This doesn’t have to be painful. It’s an essential part of your job to provide this feedback and an important part of their job to hear it and respond. If all goes well, this may be a temporary ebb in their performance that you have the skills and perspective to help your employee address. Here’s how you can broach the conversation.
Provide Reliable Feedback
Feedback is one of your most powerful tools as a manager. To spur on your team toward achieving their goals, provide high-quality feedback about their performance regularly. Make sure that the goals you set are specific, quantifiable, time-bound, and relevant to the work currently being done, and that they know any criticism is meant to help them improve their performance and continue toward greater successes. You can do this by being constructive in your criticism, effective and engaging in your communication, and directly relating their performance to the long-term success of the team.
Building Individual Buy-In
As you likely already know, as a manager, communication and motivation are two essential elements to leading a team. Keeping that in mind, getting buy-in from individual team members regarding the goals which are set is very important. When it comes to addressing poor performance, that buy-in from your employee and commitment to improving is critical to success. Taking the time to communicate performance goals, discussing the needs behind them, and your strategy for attaining them with your team members will make the process more sustainable and the goals themselves more achievable.
Reaching out and getting buy-in from the individual members of the team who will most benefit from your guidance is the best way to make sure that they understand the need for change and what your expectations are. They likely will have valuable input into the crafting of those goals and can provide a valuable perspective on whether those goals are attainable or whether there are blockers that you are unaware of. The critical thing to keep in mind is that you need to engage your team so they feel like their actions and their perspectives are valued in the planning of the business, and make sure they fully understand what is expected of them to make sure your goals are achieved.
Set Realistic Expectations
High-level goals and mission statements are critical to the long-term planning of any business. But it is the short term, action plan style goals which make sure the work gets done. Once you have your general goals in mind, do what you can to communicate expectations clearly and play to the strengths of the individual contributors. Work with the employee to draft an action plan that clearly illuminates the path to success within their role. Help them see that with small, consistent improvements, there are many opportunities to overcome even the most complicated obstacles. Small successes will lead to larger successes, and recognizing the interplay of various disciplines and skillsets within a team will help the group succeed as a whole. Make sure you are not setting your team up for failure with vague or unrealistic goals. Instead, use goal setting as a way to play to their strengths and motivate them toward greater successes in the future.
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