What Others Are Saying

I would strongly recommend First Steps to any individual or organization with a desire to foster professional and personal growth for those who want to become better leaders in their job, or just a better person period.

Director, Radiology

Performance FeedBack, part II:
Performance Coaching

or How to Have Your Employees Raise Performance (and Thank You for the FeedBack)

The Performance Coaching Process is simple to understand, easy to use, and works (i.e., gets understanding and commitment to change) with employees across the Performance Spectrum.

Note that performance coaching is a process. Like any other process, it uses particular inputs - in this case, your knowledge of the employee and their work situation, the information you've gathered about his or her performance, and your understanding of how this impacts you, your team and the organization - and focuses these towards employee-directed change. Like other processes, there are particular steps to follow in a particular order; unlike other processes, the Performance Coaching process relies heavily on the skill of asking good questions.

There are 5 steps in the Performance Coaching process:

1. Praise Performance
2. Ask Questions to Understand the Situation
3. Review the Standard
4. Ask for a Solution
5. Get Commitment

Begin the conversation by Praising Performance. That is, note the specific part or parts about the job that the employee is doing well and commend them for that particular work. Be sincere. There are two reasons for beginning your performance conversation with praise:

1. In addition to changing the employee’s ineffective behavior, you want the employee to continue doing the effective behaviors. Your praise reinforces the positive behaviors and makes it more likely that they will continue to be demonstrated.
2. You want the employee to be open to the rest of the conversation; if you jump right in with what needs to change, the employee frequently becomes defensive, arguing that they “didn’t know” or providing excuses for why they “had to” do what they did, or any other of the countless ways in which someone can try to take the spotlight off of their behavior, their accountability, and their need to do things differently. THIS RESPONSE IS EXACTLY COUNTER to what you want, so begin with praise.

But won’t this just come across as schmoozing? Buttering them up so you can take them down?

Well, yes … if the only time that you offer praise is when you are beginning one of these conversations. The answer, however, is not to remove this step, but to make performance praise a regular part of your conversations with employees. Not only does this regularly reinforce behaviors that you want to be repeated, regular, legitimate praise creates the good will and openness needed for the employee to hear your comments about improvement.

Transition to the area of performance which concerns you, but before you jump in with “what needs to be done differently,” Ask Questions to Understand the Situation from the employee’s perspective. While the Performance needs to improve in any event (you’ll get to that in a minute), for you to be able to best support the employee in their performance improvement, you’ll want to understand what sponsored or encouraged the undesired performance. More importantly, your focused questioning gets the employee thinking about the underlying issues in advance of any solutions, which is what you want. Any real solution will be one that they generate and own. For it to be effective, the solution must address not only the actual behaviors but also the drivers of those behaviors.

Based upon the situation, reference your knowledge of Performance System Analysis and use open questions to ascertain

• How well they understand the performance specifications;
• If they have all of the tools, resources, and job aids to do the job on-time, right, the first time, every time;
• How well they understand and recognize the signal to perform;
• What, if any, RoadBlocks make it difficult for them to perform to standard;
• How well they understand the necessary procedures;
• How well they understand the impact that their performance has on others;
• What Consequences promote this behavior;
• Others as appropriate.

Be aware that the employee may try to sidetrack you at this point. Redirect as needed so that you and they stay focused on the behavior in question and the potential sponsors and / or contributing factors for that behavior.

Unless you discover some RoadBlock which made it IMPOSSIBLE for the employee to perform to standard, now is the time for you to Review the Standard. This is usually a simple statement, stated in unequivocal terms, which lays out the level of performance that you expect. Do NOT blame it on the boss, e.g., “this comes straight from the top …” Stand on your own two feet: this is your employee displaying behavior that doesn’t meet your standards. Assuming that your standard is aligned with the organization and that this isn’t the very first time the employee was made aware of it, you’ll get no argument. Press on.

Ask for a Specific Solution. Note the key words in that phrase:

• ASK – Don’t tell. Don’t share your thoughts on what they should do, even if you think that you have “the answer.” At this stage (i.e., before accountability has been accepted and their solutions proposed), you want for them to “get” that their performance is their issue, which they need to fix. Rarely will information from you be the “key” that they need to improve their performance. Rather, your introduction of any inputs to their thinking will put the accountability (in their perspective) on you. Then, if they are at all resistant to the notion of doing things differently, they can intellectually sit back and verbally shoot holes in your proposed solutions; now, you’re doing all the work, and they are in control. Don’t even go here. Ask for their solution, and then wait for their answer.
• SPECIFIC – Not vague or general. “I’ll never do it again” or “you can count on me” is meaningless and shows a desire to evade rather than accept responsibility for the performance.
• SOLUTION, that is, the combination of new actions that they will take, new resources they will access, what RoadBlocks they will avoid and how they will avoid them, etc. which, taken together, make it very likely for them to succeed in raising their performance to standard.

This step in Performance Coaching can be very fluid. For some employees, this may be the first time that a supervisor ever approached them respectfully, listened for understanding, stated the performance standard, and then asked for – and actually expected a meaningful response from – the employee about what they was going to do differently. Some employees initially “draw a blank,” which is OK – let them think. Others attempt to sidetrack the conversation. Your tool for dealing with sidetracks is some version of “I understand, and we can address that later. Right now we are discussing how you can [Restate the Standard]. What specifically will you do differently to ensure that this happens?”

Once they have provided a real solution, it’s time to Get Commitment. Remember how the world worked when you were a kid: no matter what you said to a friend, it wasn’t a real promise until you said the words “I promise.” Once those magic words were stated, you were honor-bound.

The question is simple: ask “Will you do [the employee’s solution]? Can I count on you?” In adult circles, one doesn’t have to say the actual words “I promise,” but some verbal equivalent of “yes, I will do these things” is necessary and provides the employee the added incentive of having gone on record. Thank the employee for their commitment, and go forward.

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The Performance Coaching process. Five simple steps which, when followed, enable most employees to realize that this area of performance is important (at least to you) and that they need to do things differently. Most employees do change, particularly when Performance Coaching is one part of an overall Performance System Analysis. When this skill set is rolled out across the entire organization, focused on particular goals (e.g., safety), and supported by upper management, it can truly change the entire culture.

A few employees may NOT get the picture. When that is the case, you will have to modify your technique to get their understanding and commitment. In part III, which we will share with the next issue of Learning4Performance, we’ll explain a Performance FeedBack variation called Performance Accountability. Structured on the same principles, the Performance Accountability Process gives you additional levels of control so that you can successfully help the “problem employee” turn around.