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Supervision
Are your supervisors wimp-ing out
on tough conversations with
employees?
Are
your supervisor/managers skilled leaders
who can address difficult conversations head on? Or
do they put off potential confrontation and hope the
problem will resolve itself?
Your supervisors and managers must be
prepared to have difficult, even uncomfortable,
conversations with employees. It goes with the
territory. However, too many mangers practice
avoidance -- usually because they lack the skills
necessary to handle confrontation. As a result,
problems fester and their credibility and
effectiveness suffer. People problems will not fix
themselves.
Master the art of difficult
conversations...
When difficult conversations with employees happen
sooner, they go more smoothly and produce better
results; productivity increases, as does your
credibility as a leader.
How we approach a difficult conversation depends
largely on our beliefs about conflict. If you
learned as a child that conflict is a bad thing and
that you should just “go along to get along” at any
cost to avoid it, then you’re likely to fall into an
“avoidance” pattern. This approach typically just
postpones the inevitable dialogue that you need to
have with a person and can make a situation much
worse. If you learned at an early age that conflict
was a way to “express yourself, get things off your
chest, clear the air by yelling how you feel about
something,” then you might take a very direct and
confrontational approach.
In preparing to initiate what you think will be a
difficult conversation; you also have to think about
your own response prior to having the conversation.
You may be angry or frustrated with the person or
about the situation that you have to talk about.
One of the most effective things you can do is to
be aware of your response and consciously
self-manage before you engage with the other person.
Knowing that we may have a conflict with a person
triggers our normal “flight-fight” response and
affects our sympathetic nervous system, which is why
our palms get sweaty or our voice tone changes
during these kinds of interactions.
If we don’t know how to have a difficult
conversation, we can’t manage relationships. Human
relationships, inside and outside the workplace, are
bound to have times where a difficult conversation
is important to the health of the relationship. We
achieve success at work and in life one conversation
at a time, as our conversations are a big part of
our relationships.
One of the primary contributions made by Stone,
Patton, and Heen, in their book: “Difficult
Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most,” of
the Harvard Negotiation Project. is their
identification of “The Three Conversations.” Their
research concluded that every conversation has three
parts:
-
The What Happened Conversation
-
The
Feelings Conversation
-
The
Identity Conversation
When we can shift our assumptions
and goals from a “message delivery stance” to a more
positive “learning stance,” we can engage the other
person to help us figure things out. Here is a brief
overview of The Three Conversations:
1. The What Happened Conversation
You think what happened is all someone else's fault,
and the other person assumes that they are going to
persuade you that they are "right." The challenge in
this What Happened Conversation is that the
situation is more complex than either person can
see.
2. The Feelings Conversation
We often will try to ignore the feelings and focus
on the facts. Sometimes people want to ignore the
emotional side of a difficult conversation, but it
is not in your best interest to ignore feelings,
yours or another person’s. Humans naturally have
emotional responses to situations and how a person
responds to a situation should be interpreted as
facts, not touchy-feely, irrelevant concerns.
3. The Identity Conversation
The third part of a conversation is The Identity
Conversation. The challenge here is that both of you
may feel that your identity is threatened and you
enter the conversation defensively protecting your
self-image
Understanding this framework can
help you assess whether your approach is a message
delivery conversation or a learning conversation.
http://www.fccc.org/files/GC_articles12-15-04b.htm
Many managers make the mistake of just speaking
at—and not listening to—employees. They also don’t
promote a culture where employees can share their
thoughts or draw attention to problems.
Back-and-forth questioning, listening and dialogue
should be involved. Don’t fall into the trap of
thinking that scheduling a meeting means your
communication lines are open. Just because you’re
having a meeting doesn’t mean you’re communicating.
A lot of times it’s in the manager’s nature to tell
people when they’re not doing the job well, but we
don’t always tell them when they’re doing a good
job.
Making time for employees by putting away your
work, turning off your phone and giving them your
undivided attention is a fairly simple way to make
workers feel appreciated. Managers also need to sit
down to do long-range career planning; it’s the type
of support that employees will value—and remember.
Feedback is another critical way to provide
support—and its one area where managers consistently
fail. Most managers are very ineffective at giving
feedback. You have to tell people why what they’re
doing is effective or ineffective. It gives them a
lot more clarity in their jobs. If you establish
specific attainable goals up front and continuously
evaluate and reassess how people are doing, then
there shouldn’t be those surprises later on (like
when they’re the first ones RIF’d). Providing
support also means keeping employees engaged in
projects they enjoy, understanding the limits on
their ability to produce, and not being overly harsh
in criticism.
Managers often find it difficult to discuss poor
performance. In fact, many admit that they dread it,
and often avoid it altogether. One of the reasons
for this is that managers don’t have a sense of why
the person is performing poorly. Other times it’s
because they know in their hearts that they never
really gave the person enough feedback or direction
in the first place.
But cultivating a culture that’s
non-confrontational can be dangerous. If you’re
ignoring a poor performer, or someone who is
frequently absent or tardy, you’re probably also
ignoring the effect he or she is having on the team,
which likely would gain a morale boost if you fire
someone who creates obstacles to getting the job
done. Make an effort to understand the source of the
poor performance or reason for the absences and
determine if the person in question can be
reasonably developed (aka; salvaged). If not, then
it’s best to take swift action. Sometimes firing
someone is the best solution for everyone. What you
cannot do is nothing; ignoring poor performance,
lack or production, or failure to show up (at all or
on time) is terribly de-motivating to everyone else
and much more costly than you think.
Try to stay away from the typical excuses for
ignoring an ineffectual worker, such as fear of
finding a replacement. In a lot of cases, managers
have to summon the courage to get rid of those
individuals who consistently undermine productivity
and performance. If you’re not providing
constructive criticism of the work being done, then
you’re not developing people. If the message is
delivered correctly, people are often thankful for
the advice and appreciative of the fact that you
told them. And when you see someone turn it around
and start performing well, it’s such a positive
reaction on both sides.
Managers often end up being everything from a
resource and trusted associate to a mentor and
coach. Whatever the relationship, employees need a
manager’s active time and guidance. Managing is a
people job, and it often requires a whole new set of
skills with which they may not have a lot of
experience. Effective leadership—and management—can
be summed up thus: “Communication, encouragement,
criticism where it’s warranted, and having a good
attitude around the people you are leading.”
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