How to Confront Situations You Should Have Dealt with Sooner
If you think it’s difficult to have a tough conversation today, waiting makes it worse.
Time makes elephants fat, complacent, and harder to confront.
Patience:
It’s not patient to tolerate poor performance. It’s neglect. Poor performance, bad behaviors, and difficult situations continue until leaders speak up.
Be patient after you bring up issues.
The conversation you should have had:
Kind candor and courageous vulnerability chart the path forward, when you should have said something sooner.
#1. Don’t lay the law down. Delay elevates frustration. Anger fuels courage. You end up sharing a piece of your mind you can’t afford to lose.
#2. Don’t speak to the whole team when there’s one offender. One person habitually leaves early, arrives late to meetings, or misses deadlines. Have a one-on-one, even though group comments feel safer.
#3. Meet resistance with courageous vulnerability. Tom habitually misses deadlines, for example. When you bring it up, he protests. “Why didn’t you say something sooner?”
Tom is right.
Don’t defend or explain. Apologize.
“You’re right Tom. I apologize for not bringing this up sooner. Tolerating this wasn’t fair to you or the team. I’m dealing with it now. Can we fix this?” Wait for Tom to say, “Yes.”
Resistance turns to participation with “Yes”.
4 Tips:
- Build positive relationships. Have lots of positive conversations.
- Bring up issues when issues are small. “I notice you missed your last deadline.”
- What are you learning?
- What will you do next time?
- How can I help?
- Take excuses seriously. When Tom says, “I’m terrible with time management,” ask, “What would you like to do about that?”
- Develop a plan to solve issues. Don’t simply declare that you expect things to change.
Patience with poor performance eventually becomes permission to perform poorly. Approval becomes abuse.
How might leaders have the tough conversation they’ve been putting off?
Speaking the truth in love is harder than it sounds for me. I’d rather speak lies in love (flattery) or tell the truth in hate (using truth to hurt rather than help). Candid conversations are never easy but often necessary. You have to go through some bad days to get to the good ones.
Thanks Duane. Love the way you articulate some of the issues with the challenge we feel of having tough conversations.
Dan,
May I take this post in entirety and share it on my “members only” page for the Vermont Principals’ Association? Of course all credit will be to you. Your message is so powerful in this post and will be especially useful for newer leaders. Best.
J
Thanks for checking Jay. Yes, please use the post as you describe.
I sometimes wonder if you’re reading my diary. Each entry is so timely. Thank you!
Thanks Odellcs. I think many leadership issues, like tough conversations, are nearly universal. 🙂
Many people hate conflict so they avoid bringing up difficult issues–performance shortfalls. They hope things will improve on their own. The focus needs to be less on wanting to feel good-not anxious over a difficult conversation and more on –what can I do to help the employee improve, perform better. These days employees want frequent coaching and feedback.
The silver lining—having delayed in confronting an employee’s performance shortfall may provide you with more examples and a clearer pattern of his/her behavior, so when you do have the discussion you have more data.
Also, when discussing performance issues, employees need to understand the business consequence of their poor perfomance–like upset customers, unhappy team members etc.
In the past, I assumed employees understood the negative impact their behavior was having but they often didn’t make those connections.
Thanks for your insights, Paul. Examples are very useful when dealing with performance issues. People often don’t realize what they are doing that doesn’t serve them well.
Your last paragraph is a great reminder: Don’t assume people see the big picture.
I think respect plays into this situation and when you respect someone and yourself you tell them the truth and it’s okay to feel tense about it – even if you don’t respect the person you talk to you can be accountable to yourself and respect yourself. This works best when it is not done in anger, including repressed anger. To Dan’s point – own it and disclose and move to solutions.
Thanks Rose. Adding respect to the conversation is essential. Disrespect creates barriers. Great add
One point to add is to remember to not roll out every bad thing you’ve ever seen the person do. Focus on one, show what the behaviour / poor performance means to you and others, move to their acceptance of the issue, their potential solutions and any assistance you can give.
It’s too common to see people add issue after issue once they finally had the courage to have the difficult conversation. Firstly, the receiver will likely switch off and either just hear noise or just focus on you instead of the message, and secondly you need to reflect that all those other issues should have been dealt with at an earlier time – so coach yourself to respect the receiver more and provide guidance in smaller snippets more often.
Like the little bump strips on the roadway that remind you that you’re heading off course and should correct. Much better than the concrete barriers which cause damage.
Thanks Rob. Powerful! I think we tend to look for evidence to validate our position. When we do, we start muck raking.
On the other side, sometimes the person you’re talking with adds to the issue. It’s important all the way around to say, “Let’s just focus on this one thing.”
Organize what you have to say, be prepared with what is expected for the individual involved, sit down in a private setting for a o e on one chat. If you need to have support perhaps bring them in later if the conversation becomes abusive in the sense on denial by the poor performers, the scoff law experts who are tardy, lazy, abuse breaks and privileges of entitlement these people take to extreme.
If we let the process fail we have only ourselves to blame. You can’t sail the ship without the rudder!
Thanks Tim. One of the things I do with leaders I coach is help them find a structure/organization for their tough conversations. It helps alleviate stress. We should remember that a conversation may go in an unexpected direction. Being over prepared might close our minds.
Thank you for the post, Dan. Tolerating mediocrity is the downfall of every leader. Coincidentally, I’ve been struggling with my inner self lately on whether I should have acted sooner and faster to address the poor performance of my staff, and whether my kindness has been taken as a weakness, since my team and I have been addressing the issues raised the past two years systemically. Patience is really the key as overcoming inertia towards improvements take time, as urged by some of my management team members. You have certainly enlightened me. Thanks once again, Dan.
Thanks Albert. While writing this post, I grappled with the positive and negative sides of patience. In general…speak to issues quickly and make space for people to grow, adapt, and improve. As long as we see improvement.
I think being impatient about making progress is healthy. As long as we’re kind and we’ve discussed what progress looks like.
I really do appreciate this post! It’s a little tough love to managers. “Take excuses seriously!” When someone tells you who they are, believe them, otherwise, you’ll find yourself as part to the problem for not getting ahead of the accountability conversation. Also agree, don’t address the entire team for one team members shortcomings. This will inevitably annoy your performers.
Thanks Yanir. I find that we extend comfort when we should simply accept. Someone says, I’m not good with time management. We say, “Oh…you’re not that bad.” That short-circuits growth.
Maybe they aren’t that bad. So what. Go with them. Affirm them when they make progress.
Generally, everyone on a leaders staff is paying close attention to the leader’s actions. Lack of pro-action in this case can lead to the unintended consequences of the spreading of this malignant behavior. As a twice survivor of cancer, trust me putting off these difficult conversation could result in your staff becoming terminal and you becoming unemployed.
Thanks Jim. By default we affirm the negative behaviors we don’t bring up.
You remind me that people on the team are waiting for leaders to address these issues.
Indeed Dan. BTW, leaders motivated by Affiliation have an enormous amount of difficulty initiating these conversations. They just do not want to face the possibility of not being liked by the individual causing the problem, while unknowingly creating more discontent in their organization.
I think i fall in the category of sometime struggling to have the hard conversation and often delay it for the “right time”. I really appreciate you insight into why it is not appropriate to be patient with poor performance. it is not helping the person or the team. Small example from a different situation is, i’m in the process of buying my first home and was getting advice from a friend and one of his points was the first time you see your neighbors speak. After you see each other and then you try to introduce yourself it will be awkward. What I took from his article is have the courage to speak up directly but in a conversational tone when you notice poor performance. If you wait the awkwardness will only become worse.