Giving employees feedback

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I can’t take it anymore!

As a human resources consultant, it’s common for me to receive calls from supervisors who are frustrated with the performance of an employee.  Sometimes they’re beyond frustrated, they’re done.

They simply want to allow the employee to find opportunities elsewhere.  To put it bluntly, they want the person fired.

We all know how expensive and time consuming it is to find and hire employees.  Then it costs more money to train them and finance their mistakes as they go through a natural learning curve in which they are becoming familiar with the organization, the job and the processes.  Terminating an employee is not a business decision that is entered into lightly.

I start these conversations by ask for the back story; what’s led them to this moment? My next question is, “What does the employee say when you talk to them about this behavior?”

Silence.  More silence.  Lots of “ums” and “ahs”.  Okay, I’m not here to torture anyone. They either haven’t talked to the employee about it at all or they haven’t done it consistently.

If I ignore it, it’ll probably go away

I too have been guilty of not giving consistent feedback and I’ve learned from my mistakes.  Performance issues rarely, if ever, get better on their own.  Avoiding them and hoping they go away just doesn’t work.

The reason why avoidance doesn’t work is pretty obvious.  If someone doesn’t know what they’re doing doesn’t meet expectations, they won’t see a need to change.

Why do we wait?

We all know that the issue won’t go away on its own, so why do we put off telling someone they’re not meeting our expectations? Well, I think there are a variety of reasons that are unique to each individual.  The reasons I hear usually they fall into one of these categories:

      1. I’m too busy
      2. I don’t know how to talk to them about it

I think the real reason is often something else.  We all want to be liked. For some people, this drive is stronger than for others, but it is a basic human desire.  If we confront someone, they may get upset with us. Why does that scare us?

As a species, we learned thousands of years ago that in order to survive in this world you need to be part of a tribe.  Before all the modern comforts of life we have today, it was much tougher to survive alone than with a group of other humans.

I’m pretty sure this is what evolved into parents grounding children from participating in family activities or seeing friends and also solitary confinement for prisoners.  It feels bad to be alone for an extended period of time!

When you’re not liked, you are “cast out”, even if just by one person.  That taps into some programming deep in our brain as being something so bad that it could cost us our life.  We could be eaten by a saber tooth tiger!  Risking not being part of the group is not a risk worth taking.

What to do

Once you can get past this often subconscious fear, the first step is to acknowledge there’s a real problem and that you are the one to solve it.  Reflecting on this fear gives us the opportunity to override our programmed response and to respond differently.

We’re not in the position of a supervisor to be liked; we’re in it to ensure a high level of performance for our team and the organization. And we are not in jeopardy of being eaten by a saber tooth tiger.

To truly understand the problem, write down specifically what the person is doing versus what they should be doing.  It may be one thing, it may be twenty things.  Get it all down on paper.

Once you articulate it clearly to yourself, expressing it to the employee becomes much less intimidating. Once you put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, your action will start to remove all of the fears.

The performance issues are often a lot worse than you think.  You’ve been downplaying them in your mind to justify your decision to put them on the back burner. Once it’s in front of you in black and white, you’ll see there really is a problem and you need to do something about it!

Once you do this, you’ll be both motivated to address the issue head-on and you’ll have a clear understanding of what the issues are so you can have an effective discussion with the employee.

Let me know your thoughts below.

In my next blog, I’ll share some ideas about how to make this discussion go smoothly and bring about the results you want.

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