Beannachtaí na Féile Páraic oraibh! Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
This post actually has nothing to do with St. Patrick’s Day, but I just couldn’t resist marking the day!
Performance conversations (about negative performance) are nearly always a bit uncomfortable. Most of us don’t like to make someone else feel badly. Even when someone knows that they did something wrong, it still doesn’t feel good to point that out to them. Or worse, is when someone doesn’t even realize they did something wrong, and it becomes your job to inform them of that fact.
There’s a scene in the movie City Slickersthat I spent a great deal of time replaying in my head when I used to work with a young woman several years ago. Mitch (Billy Crystal) is explaining to Phil (Daniel Stern) how to program a VCR to record a show while watching another show (obviously pre-TiVo). Ed (Bruno Kirby) has been listening to this explanation for over four hours and finally reaches his breaking point and starts screaming:
“Shut up, just shut up! He doesn’t get it, he’ll never get it…The cows can tape something by now. Forget about it, please!”
This young woman that I worked with was very kind and friendly. She was very dedicated and put a great deal of effort into her work. But she just didn’t get it. It wasn’t because she didn’t want to get it or didn’t try, because she did. She was simply incapable of understanding how to do the job. There were four of us who tried to train her. We tried various different methods of training, we all liked her and wanted her to get it. She never did reach a point where she could independently assess a situation and make an appropriate decision. On the rote tasks she was great, always very focused and efficient. Unfortunately the job required the completion of more than just rote tasks and it required the application of judgment.
At my current company, we use the management language of Situational Leadership IIto discuss performance. Situational Leadership helps managers to diagnose employee’s performance issues and decide if the manager should provide more or less direction and/or support. We talk about the difference between competence and commitment. Competence is what you observe in your employees, their task-specific and transferable skill set. Commitment is harder to nail down because it is what an employee is feeling, so you may have to ask the employee about their commitment. Commitment in SLII speak consists of both motivation and confidence. The employee may have commitment issues because they don’t believe they can complete a task, or they could have commitment issues because they don’t have all the right tools to complete a task.
Applying the SLII model to the situation above with the young woman, this was obviously a competence issue, not a commitment issue. Those can be the most challenging performance conversations to have. The person wants to do well, but is mismatched in the position and isn’t capable of doing well. I recently read an interesting articleon Chris Fernandi’s Renegade HR blog. One line in the post really caught my attention: “We find success, not when we eliminate our weaknesses and become perfect, but when we find the right fit.” So after we put a great deal of effort into trying to help this woman do the job, we had to finally realize that it simply wasn’t the right fit, and she was never going to be successful (nor were we going to be successful in our training efforts).
The impetus for any unpleasant performance conversation is a negative impact to the business. In this situation, the work was being completed with an unacceptable number of errors. Rectifying the errors was fairly costly both in lost time and additional hard costs. So as difficult and uncomfortable as the performance conversations were in this situation, they had to occur. Although it doesn't feel good to have to discuss performance problems with someone who is really trying, it can actually be a win-win. The business can get someone in the position who is a good fit and does the job well, and the employee can learn more about herself and choose another position that is a better fit. In our case, the young woman got married and became a stay-home mom. It was the perfect fit for her and she's now very happy and successful. So even if a conversation seems like it might be horrible, remember that handled correctly, the outcome can be very positive.
Darcy Dees, CCP works as the Compensation Manager for Rock Bottom Restaurants, Inc., headquartered in Louisville, CO. She has worked with RBR for nearly 10 years helping to develop many of the compensation and performance management programs the company uses today. She spends what little free time she has hiking and reading.
The opinions expressed here are the personal opinions of Darcy Dees. Content published here is not monitored or approved by Rock Bottom Restaurants, Inc. before it is posted and does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Rock Bottom Restaurants, Inc.
Image: Creative Commons Photo "There be leprechauns" by tskdesign
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