This guest blog is by Rachel Brushfield and follows on from Difficult Conversations – Part 1.
6 Negative business impacts of failure to have difficult conversations
Failure to do this one activity has costly consequences:
- Paying a salary for an absent member of staff off sick to do nothing and add no value to the organisation
- Increased stress and likelihood of illness of team members
- Management time ‘holding the hand’ of poor performers with them having less time to spend with other members of staff or time to focus on important not urgent factors which make all the difference to success
- Employees being promoted when they don’t possess the capability, blocking the prospects of demotivated talented colleagues
- Recruitment cost of replacing talent who leave disillusioned and the time and cost of them getting up to speed before they perform, plus management time recruiting and training them
- Employment tribunals from avoiding problems which end up in court with legal costs and management time to resolve
Helping people to feel comfortable about having difficult conversations is budget well spent because the opportunity cost of ignoring this issue is massive.
12 Tips to have successful performance management conversations in difficult situations
- Prepare key points to get across
- Practice what you say and how you say it
- Honour the person and comment on the behaviour
- Give clear specific detail on what isn’t being done currently and what needs to be different with clear timeframes and review meetings to track change
- Give positive feedback on what is being done well by the individual
- Help them to see skills and qualities they have to successfully enable them to tackle the issue
- Put yourself in the shoes of the other person to see how the information is received and give an example of when you were on the receiving end yourself of not performing as you were expected to in order to build rapport
- Develop your emotional intelligence, empathy and rapport skills – remember only 7% of communication is the words that are used, and your body language and tone and pitch of voice have a huge impact on how the information is received
- Give specific examples rather than generalities so that the recipient can understand
- Don’t delay conversations – bring them up just after they have happened so they are fresh in their mind and use a coaching style of management to help them to think about how they can approach things differently
- Offer support to help the person to address their performance e.g. mentoring, coaching, a book etc.
- Always be fair and be aware of your own values, beliefs, bias and prejudice
Remember that, just as when disgruntled customers are handled well they become more loyal to the organisation, giving positive word of mouth recommendations, the same applies to employees. Being a boss is a bit like being a parent – you need to have clear boundaries and tackle unwanted or undesirable behaviour or chaos will ensue! Not only that, having a successful outcome from tackling well a difficult situation will give you a high like no other – a reward for your courage and you growing as a person!
Rachel Brushfield is a career, talent and learning & development strategist and coach at Energise – The Talent Liberation Company. Rachel Brushfield is an affiliate member of the CIPD and does workshops in difficult conversations. Problem behaviour transformation is a coaching specialism.
For more information see her LinkedIn profile or follow her on Twitter @talentliberator.
