How to have a feedback conversation with an employee when the situation is complex
In today’s post, I’ll discuss how to perform the feedback conversation with your employee when the situation is complex.
This is the latest in a series of posts describing how to approach a situation where the employee appeared to do something wrong, but it could be that there are greater forces that shaped the employee’s behavior, and it is uncertain what the right thing to do is. But you, the manager, has to address it. The example used from previous posts is when an employee ambushes a VP (or the VP tells you, the manager, she feels she was ambushed). I call this a “complex feedback situation.”
In the previous post, I offered five questions to ask prior to having the feedback discussion with the employee. Doing this preparation makes the conversation more sympathetic to the employee’s position, and also sets you up better for the feedback conversation.
So here are the steps to take during the feedback conversation when it’s not clear what the right employee behavior is.
Step 1: Acknowledge that it is a tough situation and try to get the employee’s perspective
A tool to analyze the greater forces driving your employee’s performance
In my previous post, I discussed the scenario where an employee’s behavior is poor, but it is plausible that the employee acted consistently and as one would expect him to behave, so it really isn’t clear that the behavior is poor. The example I used was the case of Jacob, who makes a tactical error of taking efforts to get around resistances and get in front of the VP to get her attention on a proposal. The VP turns then turns around and asks you to rein in Jacob, although this tactic has worked before for Jacob. What do you do?
Do you tell Jacob that he did a bad job, that he upset the VP, and to not confront the VP anymore? Do you ignore the request by the VP to “rein in Jacob?” In this post, I’d like to discuss a way to analyze the situation. In the next post, I’ll describe how to approach the conversation with Jacob.
When an employee does something wrong, it’s not always about the person. It’s about the system, too.
The Manager by Design blog provides tips for how to be a great manager. A task many managers neglect is that of providing performance feedback. This task is an art, and Managers tend not to do it well or in a timely manner.
One reason for this is that it isn’t always clear that the employee’s behavior is incorrect, even if a situation goes badly, or is in the midst of an organization’s dysfunction. Situations are often dynamic, complicated and difficult, and the larger forces that went into the employee’s behavior may be more at issue than the employee’s behavior itself.
In situations like this, there are two common paths that managers take:
1) Try to correct the employee’s behavior to fit within the bad situation or dysfunction
2) Ignore the employee’s behavior because it is a dysfunctional situation
In both of these paths, you’ll notice the issue of the difficult situation is not addressed. Either the manager tries to make the employee more dysfunctional, or the manager passively lets the dysfunction get worse. Neither works.
Let’s go through an example: Read more
