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DON’T wait
When someone is underperforming, a lot of leaders and managers start by sugarcoating their feedback. They don’t want to hurt the person’s feelings. They don’t want to leave them just deflated and crushed. The problem there is that then the person doesn’t get the information they need to know where they stand or how they can improve.
So a lot of leaders wait until performance reviews, and that’s when they deliver the unvarnished truth. That comes as a surprise then to their direct reports, who for the last six months thought everything was fine. If you deliver a message during a performance review that comes as a surprise to anybody on your team, you have failed at leadership. You have failed to give the feedback in real time so that they can learn from it, adapt, and make an effort at improving.
If you’re going to give that feedback in real time, you may want to rethink whether feedback is what you offer at all. There’s a growing body of research to suggest that feedback is more threatening than advice. When you give someone feedback it’s backward-looking. You’re taking them to the past, telling them you really screwed that up, and their first instinct then is to try to retreat into a shell or to try to attack.
If you can be forward-looking instead and give them advice, you can have a much more constructive conversation. And say, “In order to realize your potential, here are the three things I would love to see you change.” That feels actionable. It tells people that they’re not excelling yet, but it also reminds them that you still see potential in them and believe they’re capable of reaching it. I think that’s a message that leaders need to be comfortable delivering early and often. The longer you wait, the harder it gets to encourage people to change, and the less likely they are to even believe your message in the first place.
DON’T overgeneralize
If I could get leaders to erase two words from their vocabulary in difficult conversation, they would be “always” and “never.” And this is something that everyone who’s married or has kids should already understand. You are asking for trouble if you open a difficult conversation by saying, “Well, you always” or “you never.” The person immediately feels misunderstood. They feel like you haven’t really paid attention to the variations in their behavior. You’re overgeneralizing and creating a mountain out of a molehill, and that puts them on the defensive or leads them to disengage.
When you’re trying to coach an employee, don’t tell them they always or never do anything because then they start to question whether you’re going to even recognize their improvement. The impulse here is a reasonable one, which is you don’t want to give people feedback about an isolated incident. You’re trying to help people see patterns in their own behavior, and that’s where the greatest opportunities for growth exist. But you don’t want those patterns to be always and never. You want those patterns to be sometimes.
So an easy way in is to say, “Hey, I’ve noticed 2 or 3 times this behavior, and I wanted to make sure you were aware of it and give you a few tips on how to improve it.” Or “I picked up a couple of things, and I wasn’t sure if anybody had pointed them out to you before, but I think there’s a great opportunity for development here. Is that something you’re interested in hearing?” And you get their buy-in that this is not a completely isolated episode, but it’s also not overwhelming every single word they’ve ever said in their life, right? And that maintains their hope that there’s a possibility for change and there’s also a possibility that you’re going to reward and recognize that change.
DON’T treat all failures the same
It is always hard to coach people after they feel like they’ve failed. And I think the first thing to do is to help them make a healthy attribution for the failure, to say, the fact that you failed doesn’t make you a failure. Also, very few failures are on one person alone. Let’s make sure we analyze the situational factors and the interpersonal factors that might have contributed to this failure.
Let’s also differentiate between smart failures and dumb failures. Dumb failures are basically where you got a bad outcome and you also had a bad decision process. You didn’t consider enough options. You didn’t evaluate them thoroughly enough. I do not want you to repeat that behavior. But there’s such a thing as a smart failure. It’s where you actually had a good process that went into the decision. You vetted many different possibilities. You analyze them very carefully. You might’ve even run some pilots to try to figure out which one had the most potential. And then unfortunately, your pilot was, you know, was not accurate in predicting how the real decision was going to go. Or the world changed and you weren’t able to adapt to it in time. But we want to keep running those smart experiments where you got a bad result based on a good process.
So as a leader, it’s your job to help people analyze not just the outcome but the quality of the process. It’s up to you to not just hold people accountable for good outcomes, but also to make sure that people are assessing their processes along the way. In the long run, a good process is actually a leading indicator of good outcomes. And it’s not going to reduce your failure rate to zero, but it’s going to make sure that the failures you have are low cost and they also lead to learning, which last time I checked is the goal.