How often have you been faced with challenging underperformers?

At some point in their career most managers have the challenge of dealing with underperformers. Clearly it isn’t acceptable to get them to eat creepy crawlies in order to “Get them out of here!” – however much you may feel like it at the time. Often managers do not find out that they have hired an underperformer until it is far too late, and managing someone out of a business can be expensive, litigious, and it isn’t fun for anyone. So here are some tips to avoid it, or perhaps even turn the performance of underperformers round.

 1. Avoid the self-fulfilling prophecy that Performance is about behaviour: what someone does do; doesn’t do; what they say, the way they interact, or how they do it. It is too easy to judge the person based on your personal opinions rather than the objective facts.

FACT: They turned in a piece of work with a number of inaccuracies
JUDGEMENT: They are sloppy with no attention to detail
FACT: They were late 3 times last week
JUDGEMENT: They lack commitment or are lazy

As soon as we start making judgements about the causes of behaviour we run the risk of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. We may treat the individual as if they are sloppy or lazy and they pick up on this lack of faith in them. There is a very real chance that we could let our negative perception worsen or even cause under performance in our employee.