It’s inevitable that at some point in your career as a manager, you’ll face the problem of an underperforming team member.
Today, I want to give you an overview of how to tell someone that they are not meeting expectations, leading to underperformance.
On top of that, I want to give you some practical examples of how a conversation may be structured, based on common performance issues.
The combination of the theory, and some practical examples, should give you plenty to think about and use if you’re facing this situation now or any time soon. If you want to go deeper, I dedicate a whole module to this topic in my manager’s academy course where I go into lots of detail on how to deal with this tricky situation.
Don’t avoid the conversation
First things first. Do not avoid this type of conversation.
I get it. I really do.
It’s not an enjoyable conversation for anyone. We feel awkward, worried, maybe a bit nervous. It’s easy to bury our heads in the sand and hope the problem magically goes away.
I won’t go into details on why this is the worst thing that you can do because it should be pretty obvious. But I will say two things about it.
Firstly, if someone is underperforming, the chances are that their colleagues can see it as well. Therefore, they’ll be looking to you to act and do something about it. If you don’t, then they will start to question your leadership and you may lose the respect of the wider team too.
Secondly, I can say that after being a manager and agency owner for a combined 15 years now, people who avoid hard conversations won’t progress in their careers anywhere near as fast as those who confront them head on.
I’d go as far as to say that you’ll flat out fail as a manager if you avoid hard conversations, especially about team performance.
Okay, let’s get into the actionable stuff. Because you’re not going to avoid this stuff, right?
Make everything easier by setting expectations up front
This is a pretty fundamental part of being an effective manager. But in the context of having a conversation with someone about their performance, there are a few key things to remember.
When you need to have a conversation with someone about their underperformance, it’s a much, much easier conversation if you’d already set expectations as to what good performance looks like.
This means that the conversation itself and the feedback that you give shouldn’t be a complete surprise to your team member. They will already know what is expected of them in their role.
Whilst this doesn’t avoid an emotional reaction or them pushing back, it still makes for an easier, objective conversation about their performance.
Leading on from this, the performance expectations that you set up front can be used to bring them back on track and give them a solid plan for improvement. It’s simply a case of reiterating the expectations and levels that you’ve already set and trying to help them with whatever blockers are currently in the way of meeting them.
This means that there is far less ambiguity when you talk about the improvements that someone needs to make and the levels which they need to aim for.
Prepare for the conversation
Whilst these conversations do get easier over time (I promise!), they can still cause a bit of stress and anxiety for you as a human being. I personally believe this is good because it shows you care and respect someone.
An effective way to overcome this stress and anxiety is to prepare the conversation appropriately, giving the person the time and respect that they need.
If we also remember the principle that all feedback is personal, it’s just a question of how personal it is, then giving feedback on someone’s underperformance is at the higher end of this scale.
Whilst preparation is important, don’t take too long to prepare. When someone is clearly underperforming, you need to deal with it as soon as you can. There is no perfect timeline for this, but I would remind you that the last thing you want is for the rest of your team to think that you are avoiding the situation and not having the hard conversation when there is clearly a problem.
A framework for a difficult conversation
I’ve written about this before, so I won’t go into too much detail here. But in summary, this is an effective way to plan, structure and deliver difficult feedback to someone.
You can use this as a basis for your plan and then take the notes with you into the conversation, ensuring that you cover everything that you need to.
You can also use other feedback frameworks such as SBIA or start, stop, continue.
Top tip – if you take notes into the conversation with you and feel self conscious about looking at them, you can start the meeting by saying something like:
“It’s important to me that I get this conversation right and am as clear as possible, so I may refer to my notes a few times.”
This gives you a reason to look at your notes if you need to and ensure that you use them.
An example of underperformance and structuring the conversation
Right, let’s look at some specific examples of underperformance and how you may approach telling someone that they aren’t meeting expectations.
When someone is making basic mistakes within their deliverables
We’ll start with a basic, but common problem – when someone is making basic errors such as spelling, grammar, factual errors, data errors etc. We’re talking here about things that are objectively wrong and can make them (and your company) look unprofessional.
For this situation, we’re going to use the SBIA framework that I linked to earlier, which looks like this:
We’ll start to set the stage for the conversation and then get right into the feedback itself.
So, the conversation may go something like this.
“I’d like to talk to you about something important this morning related to your performance. I’m going to share some feedback that I have and then I’d like us to talk about how we can improve things and get back on track. Does that sound okay?”
At this point, it’s very unlikely that they’ll say anything other than “yes” because they’ll be very keen to hear what you have to say. So don’t worry too much about checking in at this point and asking this question.
“When reviewing the content audit that you worked on for CLIENT, I spotted a number of mistakes including spelling mistakes and issues with how the data was presented and formatted.”
This describes the situation and is very specific about the problems.
“You then sent the content audit to CLIENT and it contained these mistakes, meaning that you didn’t double check your work before sharing it with CLIENT. As you know, an important part of your role is to be able to complete work to a high standard and sending work that contains these kinds of errors is missing that standard.”
Now, we’re linking the mistakes to the behaviour which is basically not checking work before it’s shared. We’ve also connected the problem and behaviour to the expectation that we have of them when it comes to delivering work.
“This meant that CLIENT were sent work containing mistakes, which makes you and us look unprofessional and not very good at our jobs. While these may seem like small mistakes that don’t matter too much, these details matter because they can cause CLIENT to lose faith in our ability to do a great job for them.”
This is the real impact of the situation and behaviour that you’ve already spoken about. We are talking about the consequences and describing why this is a problem at all.
One note here is that I’ve obviously used “CLIENT” as a placeholder here. This should be the actual name of the company or stakeholder who received the work. Where possible, try to include the individual name of the point of contact or person who received the work. This helps connect the work to a real human being, not some abstract, faceless company.
“Can you help me understand why this happened and how we can work together to ensure that these kinds of mistakes don’t happen again?”
Finally, you’re opening up the floor to them to respond to what you’ve said and introducing the need to work on solutions together.
I can’t really give you examples of how the conversation may go at this point, but I would remind you that you need to keep your expectations of them and what good performance looks like in mind.
