How To Deal With Employees Who Don’t Follow Instructions
A guide to pivot skills and questions to incongruence.
Managers often find that trainees (novices) whom they give guidance to chooses to complete an assigned task in a different way than advised.
“I thought it would be better to do it this way,” trainees would say.
Sounds familiar?
As a manager, you’ve probably experienced this: When a trainee has been told to complete a specific task but you suspect that the task, or a step inside the task, was substituted for a similar alternative.
As a result, your desired outcome has not been achieved or has been achieved poorly. A pivot exists when there is a specific behaviour in a process that trainees keep choosing to replace with some alternative behaviour and this change causes a failure of the process.
When a pivot failure (non-workplace example above) occurs, we have found that experts are better served to guide trainees to the recommended behaviour, rather than rely on a mandate.
We have further found that with an incongruence conversation (workplace example below), a trainee will question their view and then change their view as to what the right behaviour is to perform.
The manager knows that the best way to reinforce pivot behaviours is with questions to incongruence, and so they begin the questions to incongruence process:
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