Managing Pressure to Achieve Excellence

Motivational Speaker for International Conferences / Seminars. Top Team Briefings. Stress Management Training. Nationwide Employee Counselling team. High Performance Executive Coaching. Post Trauma Support & Management. Workplace Bullying.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Motivational Speaker Carole Spiers Tell You How To Deal With Declining Employee Performance

Having to backtrack through the normal stages of training...

The training-up of a new team-member is a well-established process, conducted in a logical sequence of four stages: directing, coaching, supporting, delegating.


But when dealing with a case of declining performance, you may find yourself having to reverse the process and take the employee back one stage - or more.

One big obstacle is the emotive factor, often involving a clash of egos, with the manager growing impatient with the employee’s performance, and the employee sulking about percived injustices. But the way past this is very unemotive - a disciplined routine, where both sides define the situation with the utmost clarity and candour.

Mutually focusing on a specific

Instead of trying to rationalise the whole of what may be a big, complex problem, single-out one aspect of it for scrutiny.

If it’s a performance point, collect all the factual evidence in support. If it’s a behaviour, log the impressions you have received about it. This may be the first time the topic has received so much scrutiny from both angles - not only how the employee is deemed to have failed, but also how the organisation as a whole might have failed to provide adequate support.

Now invite the employee to a meeting, to try and pool your thoughts. First spell-out the problem precisely. The employee must listen carefully enough to be able to repeat back to you every point you have made. Then the employee must spell-out the problem, but from their own angle, and you repeat back their perception of the situation. (This may be the first time that you two colleagues have ever conversed on a meaningful level.)

Working towards a resolution

Now you must identify areas of agreement about the issue. If there is not enough common ground for you to work together, revisit the problem, and you may find you can both dig deeper into it and find a solution.

Then you have to judge how far to take the employee back down the training path, by judging their degree of commitment. They may have to go back to ‘directing’ level (maximum supervision). Or ‘coaching’ (progress-meetings). Or ‘supporting’ (extra resources made available). But hopefully, you will soon be back on the level of ‘delegating’ - the ideal deployment of manager and employee.

Carole Spiers is a sought-after International Motivational Speaker and BBC Broadcaster. She is a Leading International Authority on Corporate Stress and founder of Carole Spiers Group (CSG), one of the UKs leading stress management consultancies, whose psychological insights have improved productivity for clients such as Sainsbury’s, Unilever, Tecom (Dubai), the Bank of England, and many others.

CSG gives authoritative advice on healthy corporate culture and the human aspects of workplace stress, including workplace bullying, post-trauma and organizational change. Carole is Author of Tolley’s ‘Managing Stress in the Workplace’ and ‘Turn Your Passion Into Profit.’

Their publications and sales CDs have been sold globally and see their Stress Management catalogue -
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