Corrective feedback is required when an employee is behaving inappropriately.
The inappropriate behavior may be continual lateness for work, careless work, rudeness to clients or poor team work. Whatever form it takes, poor performance needs managerial action.
Failure to act on poor performance can generate a toxic work environment. The poor performer will contaminate your whole work environment over time.
Effective corrective feedback is timely, concrete and specific and given in a professional manner.
Professionalism in this context requires that you focus on the behavior, not the person and that you keep your own emotions under control. You have to be clear about what is unsatisfactory in the employee’s performance and your own motives for addressing the issue.
Avoid using words like “always” and “never” in the feedback session because they open up the opportunity for the employee to argue the point (and often rightly so).
Throughout the corrective feedback process, your role is to stay in control of the process. Do not let the employee divert attention to the behavior of someone else or raise issues that are irrelevant to the discussion. Sometimes, this may require a “broken record” approach – “We are here to discuss your performance, not Mary’s or Bill’s”.
Once you have made it clear to the employee what you consider to be unsatisfactory performance, then your task is to actively listen. In this way you get to hear the factors impacting the employee’s performance which may be systemic, personal issues or even your own behavior or communications.
In the process, you may identify things that you can address yourself, like lack of clarity of instructions or lack of training.
Whatever the influencing factors, part of your role as the manager is to determine action that needs to be taken, communicate that to the employee and set a follow-up period.
If the poor performance is of a serious nature, you need to spell out the consequences for the employee of continued inappropriate behavior, e.g. loss of an increment, demotion or loss of their job. You need to make it very clear that continued poor performance of a serious nature could lead to dismissal.
A manager who is “wishy, washy” when it comes to dealing with poor performance will lose the respect of all employees (including the poor performer). On the other hand, if you handle inappropriate behavior in a professional manner, you will communicate clear standards of behavior and gain employees’ respect.
Add your comment: What advice would you give a manager who has to provide corrective feedback to an employee?
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