Performance Frustration
It’s not uncommon for managers to be frustrated with performance on their team. In some cases, managers can quickly decide to get rid of someone on their team who is not performing.
But Wait A Minute!
If you are considering removing someone from your team for lack of performance, pause for a moment and make sure you have done all you can to set them up for success. You may just find that your poor performer is a high performer in hiding once you confirm these six factors.
The 6 Factors to High Performance
1. Provide Support:
Support your team by providing them with the resources necessary for success. When confirming that a team member truly has the necessary resources, we find that they may not have what they need to adequately perform. Part of providing resources includes a discussion with your team member about setting clear priorities against all other priorities and making sure that they have sufficient (and realistic) time to accomplish their job functions.
2. Set Expectations:
Provide clear performance expectations that both you and your team member understand. Both you and your team member should both be able to clearly describe the expectations of the work to be performed. This is no place for ambiguity.
3. Assess (or Evaluate) Capability:
I’m not necessarily suggesting a complex assessment program. As a manager, part of your job is to determine each of your team member’s individual capability to perform their job functions. Capability includes their ability to physically, mentally, and emotionally perform their job functions.
4. Provide Feedback:
Believe it or not, I’ve heard managers argue with me that they shouldn’t have to provide feedback. Their argument has been that they shouldn’t have to give feedback about doing their job, or that they pay their team enough so that they don’t have to provide feedback, or their team is at too high a level to need to provide feedback.
To be clear, everyone on your team (regardless of their performance, job grade, title, pay, etc.) requires and deserves prompt and appropriate feedback about their job performance. If a job is going well, they need to know. If a job is not going well, they need to know. BTW – waiting to provide feedback doesn’t make it any easier.
5. Discuss Outcomes (or Results):
What does success look like? Everyone needs to be clear about the result that needs to be produced by your team member.
Once the work results are completed, be clear with your team member about the consequences if the results are not met. It is important that the consequence is appropriate for the work being done.
A consequence could be anything from “we will have an uncomfortable conversation when you explain why you didn’t create the expected result” to “there will be a financial impact to your commission if you don’t produce the expected result”.
A reward could be anything from “once completed, you will get a new project” to “this is the bonus you will be eligible for once the result is produced”.
6. Provide Opportunities to Develop:
Another part of your job as a manager is to improve the skills, knowledge, and abilities of your team. Some of the best ways to do that are to provide opportunities for your team to grow through experience. Send them to targeted training, conferences, and seminars. Provide them information resources like books, trade journals, access to podcasts or videos.
Your Next Steps: Rank ’em
From this list of 6 factors, rank them in order of your where you are strongest as a manager to where you need to give more attention.
____ Provide Support
____ Set Expectations
____ Assess (or Evaluate) Capability
____ Provide Feedback
____ Discuss Outcomes (or Results)
____ Provide Opportunities to Develop
Go ahead, be brave. Put your strongest factor and weakest factor in the comments.
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