Confronting Lovable Under-Performers and Landmine Employees

Many managers find it difficult to effectively correct underperformance, and two chronic under-performers are particularly difficult to address. Whether we worry about hurting the feelings of a really nice/popular team member, or simply want to avoid the emotion of an angry, defiant one; poor performance is often ignored under the guise of "preserving peace."

Ignoring underperformance can cause several negative implications.  High performers will often abandon organizations where average/poor performance is excused.  This is very costly, not only in lost productivity, but also in the cost to recruit, hire, and train replacements.  Second, those who stay with your organization may adopt a "mediocrity mindset" and become progressively less productive.  They see no reason to continue to work hard since there are others who don't work hard, and aren't held accountable, yet quite often are making roughly the same if not more money depending on position and longevity.  Finally, if low productivity or unacceptable actions by team members aren't corrected, a toxic environment can begin to take root and actually become the prevailing climate.  This causes stress, poor performance in the marketplace, high customer/client turnover, and will ultimately can cause your organization to have a reputation as a place top performers won't want to go.

This session will teach you how to facilitate a constructive initial conversation, create a coaching strategy that directly ties performance to key objectives, and hold the person accountable with quantifiable metrics. If you or some of your supervisors/managers are avoiding having courageous conversations, these strategies will help you to more effectively improve results and ensure progress. This approach minimizes the emotional or subjective aspect of coaching/correction and allows both parties to focus on the objective facts and the logical steps to improvement.

By creating measurable benchmarks, subsequent coaching and/or disciplinary conversations can be conducted rationally and eliminate claims of unfairness or favoritism. While no one can guarantee that a person who feels threatened won't react in a negative fashion, these strategies do ensure a clearer path to a resolution.

Learning Objectives:

• Hear possible external considerations to evaluate that may be contributing to underperformance.
• Review questions for investigating and understanding what is causing the underperformance.
• Discover a simple strategy for conducting an accountability conversation that gets to the heart of the matter without the emotion that often results.
• Discuss the necessary components of an effective action plan to help them recover and begin performing at an acceptable level.

In-person session offerings are on a first-come, first-served basis.