Delay, Delay
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My attorney friends have a saying: "Delay, delay. The witness may die or go away." In may experience, too many supervisors feel that way about talking to their people about behavior and performance issues.
HR Morning recently posted on the issue with the headline: "The hidden cost of delaying those 'difficult conversations.'" Here's the lead.
"Talk may be cheap, but it seems silence is expensive. You won’t believe how much a new survey says it costs when employees put off having crucial conversations about workplace issues."
The consulting firm, VitalSmarts, conducted an online survey that drew 656 responses. You can download a PDF of the Survey Results. The process is seriously flawed, but still highlights an important issue.
The firm says that the margin of error is "approximately 3 percent." Unless there's something in the methodology I missed, that number is fairy dust, since no sample was created and no population was defined.
Most of the "findings" are fairy dust too, especially the ones about "cost to the organization of avoiding or putting off the conversation." Those are estimates by respondents with no guidelines for how they are to be calculated.
Most distressing to me, there is not option for "I had the conversation and it went horribly." The assumption seems to be that things went well, no matter how long the conversation was delayed.
That's not how it works. The longer you put a conversation about performance or behavior off, the harder it is to get a good outcome.
That leads us to one worthwhile bit of data from this survey. Only 15 percent of respondents said they handled the conversation, "quickly and well."
This is not surprising. In 2008, I blogged on "Three reasons why managers don't do people management." Supervisory conversations are the most difficult and most-dreaded part of people management.
For years I asked class participants to name the part of the job they hated most. "Talking to team members about performance and behavior issues" came out on top every time.
The fact is that if you're a boss and you don't have timely and helpful conversations with your team members about behavior and performance, both productivity and morale suffer. We can fix this, but it won't be easy.
Select new supervisors based on their demonstrated willingness to talk to others about behavior and performance.
Provide supervisors with training on how to hold these conversations effectively.
Evaluate supervisors on how they conduct supervisory conversations.
Boss's Bottom Line
Supervisory conversations are one of the most important parts of your job. They're critical to both performance and morale. Learn to do them well. Then do them promptly.
Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.
Hi Wally,
Thank you for sharing, I completely agree with your perspective on this issue. It is human nature to put off the undesirable, but often times this just exacerbates the initial problem. Especially with people, whose behaviors and attitudes do not just dissipate over time. Thanks again for the great reminder!
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Thanks for commenting, Mackenzie. I think the hardest thing about fixing this is that many people are selected for supervisory work when the act of talking to others about behavior is simply terrifying for them. No amount of training will fix that and it means that it's very hard to do a good job as a boss.
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Hi Wally,
Great post! Although it is hard to have discussions around performance and behavior, continous feedback (both positive and negative) from managers is important. Not only does avoiding this conversation prohibit managers from developing their people management skills, but it also prevents employees from being comfortable with hearing any seemingly negative comments regarding performance and behavior as well. If employees only hear praise or, even worse, nothing at all they are not able to become accustomed to hearing critical things about themselves, making the conversation much more awkward than it needs to be. Managers and employees both need to work to feel comfortable in these situations in order to grow as individuals and as a team.
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Thanks, Melissa. You're right. Lots of small, routine conversations make it easier to address important issues.
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When managers don't share honest feedback with their people, they actually end up doing a disservice to the team members.
One of the strategies that has always worked for me (so far) is having scheduled (but informal) one on ones with the team members periodically. That makes it easy to communicate and helps building trust. With trust, feedbacks (positive or negative) are received more constructively.
In my view, feedback sharing is not only "once in 6 months" activity, but rather an ongoing one - and sooner it is done, the better.
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That strategy follows a good principle of supervision, Tanmay. As a general rule, the more frequently you talk with your team members about performance issues, the more effective you are and the less likely it is that you'll have need for giant, confrontive sessions.
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Great post, Wally. The need for appropriate, regular performance feedback is one of those supervisory truisms that we all should know, yet which still seems distressingly rare in the wild.
While delaying action to handle negative behaviors may lead to tacit approval of that behavior - and thus ugly surprises down the road, when the "last straw" is perceived by the supervisor, or someone (the bosses boss, the team, HR, etc) forces the issue - an equally abhorrent practice is the passive-aggressive response, in which the supervisor treats the employee like garbage in the hopes that the employee figures out what they did wrong, or they leave.
As you point out, this is yet another result of failing to appropriately select people who demonstrate leadership/supervisory potential (and instead selecting solely on individual contributor superstardom), and dumping folks into people-managing roles without guidance, training, or feedback.
The solutions are all right there in front of us - hire people who show supervisory talent, show them how to do it, and model feedback by providing it to them and asking for it yourself.
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That's for lots of great stuff, Scott. I like your reference to being "passive-aggressive." Over the years, I've heard way too many supervisors say some version of "Well, if he doesn’t know what's wrong, I'm not going to tell him."
I also really liked the summary at the end of your comment. It really sums up things well.
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Interesting post, it shows how important it is to have conversations and how they imapct..This reminds of a video I saw recently called "A Conversation with You" http://www.vineetnayar.com/a-conversation-with-you/
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