How to Identify and Break Them

More and more, managers are expected to recruit team members whom they have never met face to face, and perhaps never will, for remote work. Still more daunting than this leadership trial, are difficult conversations for conveying feedback for course correcting unacceptable performance, behavioural or task-related, across digital distance to these employees. More than ever before, they will have to become proficient at having these difficult conversations.

A feature of these difficult conversations is that managers can find themselves going around in circles, for months, and years, without resolving the issues at stake.

How can managers tell when they are feeding one, or other, persisting dynamic with their employees? Identifying it is critical to breaking its stranglehold on what business results they accomplish.

There are 4 prevalent self-perpetuating patterns.

1. Avoid-Sustain

With team cohesion risks and likeability concerns preying on the minds of managers, it is not hard to see how they could imagine the only possible outcome of a difficult conversation of this nature will be negative, and best avoided. It need not be so.

 A manager’s avoidance behaviour, for fear of conflict, being disliked, or any other reason, leaves team members uninformed and unmotivated to adapt their behaviour and performance. Paradoxically, when employees sense they are not receiving honest feedback from their managers, they accord them reduced likeability and trust.

Not discounting the emotional turmoil many managers experience when faced with this situation, addressing performance issues sooner rather than later can make all the difference to guiding an employee’s behaviour to meet organisational expectations. Without any managerial intervention, adverse performance will be encouraged and sustained, leaving managers to adjust the work themselves to reach an acceptable standard.

• Approach-Resist

If employees have had little or no intimations of managerial dissatisfaction, when managers eventually broach the issue, they can expect resistance. Employees are more likely to accept accountability for, and redress underperformance, if they feel they are being treated fairly. Untimeliness impacts perceptions of fairness.

Calm introspection will reveal opportunities for getting onto a thinking track, more supportive of their managerial intentions. Initial beliefs managers have about situations determine the outcomes they foresee. Examining a few alternative beliefs, instead of locking into the worst one, unlocks possibilities for making the best outcome more likely, and the feared one less likely.

It helps to storyboard these alternative beliefs, eg. when I hold belief 1 about the situation (this is too emotionally exhausting for me to engage in), this is how I feel, this is how I behave and this is the outcome I anticipate. Every alternative belief can then be examined in the same way, and will lead to different outcomes. Thereafter, the obstacles each belief presents, and how to overcome them by taking appropriate steps, should be considered.

• Buckle-Prevail

Ambiguous or inconsistent messaging on underperformance feeds self-perpetuating patterns. Managers buckling under pressure of self-doubt, when confronted with employee objections, will fail to hold them accountable consistently, or at all. Astute employees could use this as a test of managerial intentionality. Not standing up to intentionality scrutiny, generates employee uncertainty and self-protective behaviour, whilst underperformance prevails.

Fear of micro-managing is symptomised by distributing tasks vaguely, and just letting employees get on with it. Communicating with clarity when distributing tasks, what done satisfactorily looks like concretely, when outcomes should be delivered, and whether there are non-negotiables is not micro-managing. Doing so creates psychological safety to work autonomously fully informed of the end result, with freedom to choose how to arrive there.

Preparation in advance, including anticipating personal vulnerabilities, emotional and body conditioning as well as objections from employees, should equip managers better to convey their concerns unambiguously.

• Dissociate-Reorientate

When managers recognise being continuously triggered by employees’ emotional reactions when tackling underperformance, they can make a conscious decision to dissociate themselves from it. Stepping outside the situation to view its context more broadly, puts them in the driving seat to break the previous interrelationship pattern.

Role status levelling can attenuate interpersonal antagonistic manager-employee reactions. Treating an underperforming employee as an advisor has the effect of emotional disarmament and status elevation: ‘What can I do differently to support you better?’ This can then be followed up with; What can you commit to doing differently if I implement what you have suggested?

Brain mirror activity decodes sensory information we receive from others, enabling the employee to perceive his manager’s more positive emotional tone, and mirror his responses to it, as he re-orientates himself. A new dynamic of the manager re-configuring her behaviour and the employee reaching out for support and guidance can now emerge.

Managers need to consider what they hope for in improved employee performance, and actively deploy their efforts to help elevate team members’ capabilities. Increasing the manager-employee bond inspires confidence in employees to raise their performance bar.