If it has never occurred to you that confronting poor performance can be both enjoyable and productive, you're far from being alone. Sadly, the common perception is that it has to be a tense, gut-wrenching experience for manager and employee alike.
Properly done, confronting a poor performing employee is an enjoyable experience – seriously! But the key to thinking of it this way is to flip our definition on its head.
For too many managers, they "confront poor performance" when an employee's actions have become pronounced or they're negatively impacting others. But when you wait that long to address any situation, behaviours have often been set, lines have been drawn in the sand and you're guaranteed an uphill, potentially painful battle to redirect your employee's actions.
That's not confronting poor performance; that's confronting fatal performance.
In reality, confronting poor performance, part of the larger process of managing poor performance, is about addressing an issue with an employee at the very first sign of a behaviour problem. Not confronting early can actually appear to be condoning the problem. This comes with two critical points of clarification:
- "Poor performance" can be the seemingly smallest thing in the world. The point is, you want to "nip it in the bud" quickly before the employee believes their behaviour is okay and before it becomes a larger problem.
- Don't think of "confronting" in the uncomfortable, stressful context that society associates with it. Instead, it should happen informally, without hardly any pretext, whether that be at the water cooler, over a coffee or just in the hallway. Confronting an issue can be done very quickly!
When you start to think of confronting poor performance in this way, and address problems immediately, you'll find that the need to "confront" is dramatically reduced; in its place, you're simply coaching. And that's the critical point: Effective confrontation of poor performance is regular coaching.
No one relishes confronting, at least not in the common sense of the word. But as managers, we all need to coach. It's an opportunity to develop your employees, to create a more positive working environment, to improve team productivity, to improve the bottom line. And when you start getting these outcomes, you're going love confronting poor performance.