An employee misses the deadline on an important project. An expensive marketing campaign delivers lukewarm results. How you respond determines whether your organisation learns from such moments and goes on to improve - or whether a pattern of repeated failure is established instead.
When confronted with sub-par performance, many of us employ work-arounds rather than directly addressing the problem, write Bruce Bodaken and Robert Fritz in The Managerial Moment of Truth: The Essential Step in Helping People Improve Performance (Free Press, 2006).
Our reasons for this avoidance are understandable - and all too familiar. We feel we don't have time to correct ineffective work habits. We dread conflict and fear that painful conversations about substandard performance will destroy morale and drive employees away. But avoidance can carry a high price, says Fritz.
For one thing, he says, "when you shift work to your best performers, you put them at risk for burnout, and you under use your workforce overall."
For another, avoidance creates a vicious communication circle: You say nothing until your annoyance with a performance problem reaches unmanageable levels. Then you overreact - with an intensity that's out of proportion to the problem.
But the most significant consequence of not acknowledging poor performance is that you deny yourself and your colleagues vital opportunities to identify what went wrong. In other words, you miss the chance to activate a cycle of continuous learning.
{{/usCountry}}But the most significant consequence of not acknowledging poor performance is that you deny yourself and your colleagues vital opportunities to identify what went wrong. In other words, you miss the chance to activate a cycle of continuous learning.
{{/usCountry}}To counter managers' reluctance to address problems head on, Fritz developed what he calls the Managerial Moment Of Truth (MMOT) process, composed of these four steps:
* Acknowledge the truth
* Analyse how things got to be this way
* Develop an action plan
* Create a feedback system
To illustrate what it looks like in action, we've used the example of you, the manager, talking with an employee about a missed deadline.
Acknowledge the truth
The first step of the MMOT process is removing the distortions created by biases, defensiveness, and previous experience so that both persons involved in a dialogue can agree on the plain facts of the situation.
To keep this part of the conversation focused on the facts, free of subtext, you may repeat: "The project was due May 23, and now it's May 29. Is that right?" Comments such as "You let me down" or "Missing deadlines is unprofessional" would be counterproductive because they only increase your employee's defensiveness.
The aim of the MMOT process is to refocus the person from the subjective realm of feelings to the objective realm of facts.
Analyse the situation
Once you and your employee have agreed on the situation, you can work together to track the thoughts and decisions that led up to it. In essence, you're asking: "What decisions did you make? Why did you make those decisions? What was the outcome of those decisions?"
Here is a dialogue adapted from Bodaken and Fritz's book that illustrates this step:
You: "What happened? Why did we miss the due date on
this project?"
Employee: "The work took longer than I expected, and I got too busy with other things."
You: "When you were planning your work on this project, did you add the other things into the equation?"
Employee: "No."
You: "What does that suggest?"
Employee: "My planning was off; I should have looked at the whole picture."
You: "So it sounds like for future projects you need to make a more comprehensive assessment of your workload before agreeing on a deadline?"
Employee: "Yeah, that's what I should do."
Notice how these questions focus on the employee's decisions, assumptions, and thought processes - not others' possible contributions to the missed deadline.
Develop an action plan
This step builds on Step 2 to form a workable, practical plan to avoid similar problems in the future. The plan for improvement can be simple: "Take ongoing projects into account when calculating how much time a new project will take."
You should prompt your employee to suggest the action plan, providing ideas only if he has difficulty conceiving new approaches.
Create a feedback system
When your employee puts the action plan into practice, he may discover that the plan needs adjustment. For this reason, it's vital that the two of you establish a feedback system that will enable you to identify where changes may be required. Talking about poor performance will never be easy. But when both participants in the discussion are well versed in the MMOT discipline and understand the objective of each step, they will find these discussions more comfortable.
Courtesy: HMU distributed by New York Times Syndicate