How avoiding performance conversations can impact employee engagement and business success.
- sarah12894
- Nov 14, 2024
- 3 min read
A significant part of a leader’s role is to drive performance through the achievement of goals, projects, change initiatives and team collaboration and the majority of experienced leaders are capable and confident to do so. The challenge they experience is when individuals don’t perform to the expected standards of performance or behaviours. Here’s where their job gets harder as they need to lean into difficult conversations and possibly disciplinary actions.
I recall having to performance manage a young, inexperienced HR professional. They made a careless error and breached employee confidentiality when they forwarded a CV to the Warehouse Manager, who had been haggling her for information about the new Head of Operations starting soon. This individual hadn’t paid attention to the document’s contents which included salary information about the new leader.
The event unravelled over the coming weeks and email records were pulled as evidence of the confidentiality breach. I sat the employee down and discussed the serious nature of this performance issue including the evidence substantiating the breach. The employee acknowledged their mistake, apologised profusely, explained the sequence of events and demonstrated great remorse for their actions. The COO was also present to this conversation and with some persuasion from me, agreed to issue the employee with a first and final warning rather than a termination. It was an awful sequence of events which tarnished the HR professional’s trust and credibility with the relevant leaders.
The individual learned a significant lesson and was more diligent and cautious with personnel documentation from that day forward. The point of the story is that even when an employee makes a mistakes the leader needs to weigh up the context, environmental factors and employees responses when upholding company polices and managing behaviour and performance standards.
According to 2020 research by the CMI (Chartered Management Institute), 61% of difficult conversations are related to inappropriate behaviour in the workplace (31%) and feedback on poor performance (30%) and further research from DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2023, suggests that only 30% of leaders express confidence in their ability to manage conflict.
So where does that leave us? My philosophy on employees, is that everyone comes to work to do a good job and if they fall short of that, for some particular reason, the majority would in fact want to be made aware of the issue so they can rectify it.
When issues are ignored or poorly managed, the impact to business includes loss of productivity, reduction in employee well-being (through stress and burnout), reduced employee engagement, increased staff turnover and an overall negative impact to team morale and culture. Avoiding conflict because of uncertainty is a poor choice for any manager. We need to be supporting, training and coaching our leaders to better manage performance and engage in disciplinary conversations with confidence.
"Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want to fire somebody with his experience?”
Thomas John Watson Sr. former chairman and CEO of IBM
Here’s 6 questions to ask yourself when faced with performance issues.
Are there clear, documented performance expectations for this role? (performance and behavioural)
What are the facts, issues or circumstances of the underperformance?
What role have I played or not played in supporting, training or providing feedback to the employee?
Are there any potential biases affecting my judgement?
Has anything in the employee’s personal or professional life recently changed?
What impact is the issue having on the team or business?
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