How To Figure Out Why Your Employee Isn’t Performing
Is it an issue of skill or a will?
I still remember the first time I hired an employee on my team who wasn’t performing. The temptation to ignore the situation and hope it went away was very real. At the time, it felt so personal as if this employee was doing something to me by failing to meet expectations. Frankly, I remember it feeling a lot like a kick in the gut.
I also remember the choice that my boss gave me in dealing with it.
She told me that I could choose to ignore it, compensate for it, work around it, and accept the toll it will take on the rest of my team’s morale, or I could opt in to having the difficult conversation needed to address it.
When she put it that way, it didn’t feel like much of a choice.
The issue with ignoring performance problems is that doing so always ends up causing more damage than addressing it head-on does, and I didn’t want to be the kind of leader that avoided the tough stuff. I decided to address it.
The first step of dealing with a performance problem is uncovering why the employee isn’t performing. And there are only two options — skill or will.
