Top 10 Tips for Providing Constructive Feedback
Most managers experience some degree of anxiety when delivering constructive feedback on performance weaknesses. While it can be a sensitive topic in informal sessions, poor performance can be a more difficult discussion during a formal performance review due to implications on compensation and record keeping. While the tips below are good rules to follow regardless of the forum, they tend to take on more meaning during the formal review process.
The Art of Coaching Employees
Great coaches are made, not born. They spend years learning what works to create a motivated, highly engaged team. From sports to business, whether coaching athletes to coaching employees great coaches can bring together individuals with different styles and strengths and persuade them to focus on a shared goal, mission and values. Such leaders take time to understand their team members’ personal goals, help them improve their skills, and acknowledge how individual achievements contribute to the team’s success. Coaches who do those things achieve excellent results, from Little League to the big leagues to the workplace. Of course, if you want results, you have to make the effort to get to connect personally with the members of your team. This is more than making small talk at the water cooler about family or the weather. Those office pleasantries are important, but they won’t do much for the success and growth of your business. What will help is understanding your employees’ preferred learning styles and communication preferences. Your ability to recognize and act on this valuable information will help you become a very successful coach. 2 Critical Components for Employee Coaching 1. Understanding Learning Styles As an adult, or maybe even as a child, you probably discovered that you have a preferred way of taking in new information. This is one of your strengths and is something academics and educators would call your “learning style.” Performance Culture subscribes to Neil D. Fleming’s Visual Auditory Kinesthetic (VAK) model of learning styles. This model suggests that most people have one of three preferred learning styles, although some people learn best through an even balance of all three. Fleming’s model three categories include: Visual learners People who learn by seeing. Visual learners assimilate information by looking at pictures, charts or videos, and demonstrate their skills through reading, writing, puzzle building, drawing, fixing and designing objects. They typically have a good sense of direction. Auditory learners People who learn by listening. Auditory learners are typically good at making speeches or presentations, think in words rather than pictures, enjoy learning through lectures, and have strong listening, storytelling, teaching and memorization skills. Kinesthetic learners People who learn by touching, moving and doing. Most kinesthetic learners have good hand-eye coordination and balance, find it hard to sit still for long periods of time, and express emotions with their bodies. As a manager, it’s your job to recognize that each employee has a preferred learning style or a combination of styles. Your coaching efforts can and should include helping your employees recognize and use their preferred learning styles on the job. As their manager, you also may need to adjust your way of communicating with individual employee, or use several methods of communication (staff meetings, web portals, whiteboards). Learn more about WorkDove’s Performance Review Software today! 2. Recognizing Communication Preferences Communication preferences go hand-in-hand with learning styles. While people are generally aware that they have communication strengths, they may not be aware that these communication styles are well defined and produce specific and unique patterns. An individual’s communication style can be determined, shared and enhanced through the use of our Performance Culture System and our partnership with Forté Institute. From the individual’s primary profile, Forté creates a report that presents the environment he or she needs to be self-motivated, effective and productive. In most Forté profiles, a primary communication style strength will be evident, which will most often control that individual’s attitudes, actions and responses. These strengths also will reflect how an individual thinks, understands and comes across to others. Forté Assessments identify four primary communication strengths: • Dominance/Non-Dominance. The dominant person is primarily concerned with getting things done. Dominant people are hard-driving and dislike indecisiveness. They are risk-takers. The non-dominant person is characterized by a non-threatening way of working with others, is mild-mannered, composed and often modest. Non-dominant people prefer direction. • Extroversion/Introversion. Extroverts are friendly, persuasive, emphatic, enthusiastic, talkative, motivating and optimistic. They are good mixers and good coordinators. Introverts take great care in protecting their private lives. They are creative and have an individualistic side that can manifest itself in a vivid imagination and the ability to think things through to a conclusion. • Patience/Impatience. The patient individual is easygoing, steady, amiable, warm, dependent, sincere and a good listener. Patient people like peace and harmony, time to adjust to change, and to be cooperative. The impatient person is action-oriented and often has to do things twice for lack of adequate planning. These individuals like to keep busy and have others respond quickly to them. They learn quickly and prefer variety. • Conformity/Non-Conformity. The conformist will be careful, thorough, skillful, dependable, conservative, anxiety-prone and sensitive to criticism. Favoring details and systems, conformists want outcomes to be “right” and fair. The non-conformist is characterized by a generalist orientation to life. These individuals usually are uninhibited, candid and relate well to activities that take them out of ordinary situations. They can be resistant to controls and will tend to rationalize. Wrapping up: Become an Effective Employee Coach These profiles offer coaches valuable insight into what motivates their employees as individuals. The Cornerstone team has seen how applying this information will led to remarkable improvements in employee engagement. I truly believe that there is an art to coaching employees. To become an effective coach, you must adapt your style of teaching and communication to the person you are coaching and help him or her do the same with others.
How to have Candid Conversations with “Disengaged” Employees
A few years ago I was asked to coach an employee because the manager realized the person was not demonstrating his potential nor supporting the culture. The coaching engagement was a bit unusual because most of our leadership coaching focuses on “Star” employees or ones with high potential. The manager hoped the coaching would motivate the employee to buy in to the culture and become a high performer. Learn more about WorkDove’s Performance Review Software today! While we’ve had success doing this in the past, I could tell it wouldn’t work this time. In fact, I told a guy that if I were he, I would quit (which he eventually did). However, the initial conversation with him came across as dramatic. He couldn’t believe I would be so candid but I knew the employee wanted to do something else and there wasn’t upward mobility for his skill set. You don’t show a person any dignity by telling him to stay in a job that they’re not suited for or won’t be happy in. I would rather absorb the organizational complication of figuring out how to fill a role instead of keeping an employee in a role that will just drift by. The employee will be better off as well as the organization. Helping employees achieve their personal vision inside or outside of your organization will help team members think about what’s really important to them. Continuously doing this will ensure you have a team that’s passionate about the company and will put in the extra effort to make something extraordinary happen. Zappos has an amazing policy I wish all businesses could afford. When Zappos hires you they give you an offer letter and right after you sign it the manager hands you a three-month salary package to quit the job you just took. The offer stands for the entire first year. What Zappos knows is that it costs an organization too much to have employees drift. The leaders cannot afford to lead a team with people who don’t WANT to be there, people who are actively sabotaging internal energy, even if it’s not on purpose. If you’re reading this and you’re a leader and know there are people on your team who are not operating at a high efficiency or high productivity rate, you may not have the right people on your team. However, before you assume the issue is with the employee, you should make sure the issue is not with the manager. Ineffective managers can be the root cause of employee issues. I think the most important thing to do is realize that holding onto the lackluster employees could be keeping you from hiring the employees you need. You could also be keeping employees from the opportunity that waits ahead of them. The people you are leading are likely moms and dads first. They are people who had dreams of what they wanted to do when they grew up. So if they’ve gotten to this place in their life where they are unproductive or in a funk, your job as their leader is to not necessarily manage the position they have, but to lead them as individuals, even if that means leading them out of their current position. Performance Culture developed a performance management software to help leaders have these “crucial conversations” with employees and managers.
