How to correct a team member: avoid my damaging rookie mistakes
deliverydoubled.com
deliverydoubled.com
- Correct in private, praise in public.
- Correction needs to be proportional to what happened.
- Employee level matters. For example, a manager should be gentler with a junior IC than a SVP.
- Always be direct and specific.
- Keep issues internal. Customers should only see a united front, that also takes ownership of problems.
- Think it through, don't correct while being emotional.
- Listen, because maybe they are right after all
If I'm admonishing, it will be privately face-to-face unless I absolutely can't otherwise. Quite often I'm trying to be gentle, but email just loses too much context and it comes across as me being genuinely upset.
E.g. "this will make me look so much smarter"
On the one hand, when he's right (which is often) it can save some work, but on the other hand, he's not always right, and he always sounds like an ass.
I've repeatedly asked management to have a word with him about it, but they haven't because he's a valued team member and they don't want to rock the boat. I ended up blowing up at him over email about it and he's definitely been less of a dick to me about these things, but he continues to be a dick to everyone else about it because it makes him look smarter. It's pretty irritating and I never want to have to work with him again because of it.
Nothing worse than getting "correction" about trivial things.
Luckily the entire organization is like this, but it definitely extracts a moral cost.
The old adage comes to mind, "it's not what you say, but what you tolerate". If you communicate a reasonably good standard early on, it is helpful for the entire team.
If I can praise and lift up 95% of what someone is doing, they will do more of that, and less of the 5% that I'd otherwise like to see be done better — unless that 5% has a disproportionate amount of damage to the organization.
This is very good manners and also the default in some cultures, a huge humiliation to do otherwise.
On the other hand you might have people, who will always argue against anY correction you have and correcting in private makes it seem for them, that the discussion is 50-50, that it is only you telling them something is wrong and their opinion is as good as yours. It might not be worth correcting, unless critical, in such cases though.
+ When stating the issue, avoid using "You are/were", prefer "You did/didn't do".
EDIT: and especially, absolutely avoid saying "You will never"
Effectively influencing people's behavior while maintaining trust takes time. If someone is doing 3 things you don't like, pick the one you want to address in the next 2-6 weeks, and let the other ones slide for the time being. If you're building long-term relationships, there will be more time, and as you build trust giving (and receiving) feedback becomes easier for all parties.
Urgency is the enemy in this situation.
Would a more constructive way to describe this be: 'helping people to grow'? To me 'influencing' sounds covert and without consent. They would also personally benefit from using the strategies you'd like them to employ, right? Why try to 'influence' them, when it could be something achieved with their full participation and consent? Then it becomes something you've done together, instead of you having successfully 'influenced' them (read: manipulated).
When talking about this I do acknowledge the constraints of modern day workplaces, and I think with that comes the importance of showing them the organizational constraints - the challenges you face as a leader or manager, in your role - and being open with them about how their various efforts can support you in that role.
"My employee" if you're a manager they're not your employee; "a member of my team" that doesn't make clear if they report to you or you're on the same level of the hierarchy; "my direct report" I just find this a weird/confusing turn of phrase whose purpose seems to be avoiding using the term "subordinate."
E.g. different companies will prioritize different things and the correct behavior is contextual; for a very crude and simplified example, if some employee puts speed over correctness and the company wants them to change their behavior to value correctness over speed (or the other way around! their previous workplace might have worked hard to instill the values you're trying to reverse!) then that's not really 'helping people to grow' but just that - influencing their behavior patterns.
"Asking to understand" is toxic and passive-aggressive. I have a hard time imagining a worse management technique than to put someone on the defensive without even telling them what the conversation is about. This is the opposite of openness and transparency and it is what is killing work culture.
What if the issue isn't a deficiency? What if it's a case of your employee understanding the problem better than you, and coming to a better solution?
Asking to understand is toxic if you're certain that there is something that needs correction. It's not toxic if you have an open mind and accept that the employee might have done the correct thing in a situation for reasons you don't yet understand.
But if you have a history of asking: "Hey, I'm curious about X? Why did you do that?" and you have a history of 25% of the time responding to their answer: "Oh! Cool! Great idea, I didn't think of that" and 75% of the time responding: "Ah, gotcha. I might've reframed it this way because of Y", then you'll have that trust.
The employee isn't a mind reader, but they are a behavior reader.
And if you really are asking with an open mind each time, then your past behavior will reflect that.
You explain what you see as the problem as clearly as possible, and you try to get the other person's view of what went wrong and why.
I use this often in a management role. You explain, explicitly, clearly, and carefully what you see as gone wrong, but not your perception of the intention behind it. In fact, you try to avoid having that perception or trying to guess the intention. That's management/working with other humans 101.
Then you ask probing questions to get at the why that choice was made/mistake happened.
The idea being that most people act in good faith and rarely make a complete fuck up out of maliciousness. They do it because of a lack of information or a lack or perspective or lack of training/knowledge, or because you as the manager lack one of those things and can't see the solution was actually a good solution.
You can fix the last four, you can't fix malicious. And asking questions reveals what the deficiency is.
If a manager makes that conversation into a 'gotcha' scenario without laying out what the issue is first and immediately, they're bad at their job.
And if an employee gets defensive about a fuck up, they're a bad employee.
X has a problem with something Y did.
X: "So... talk to me about what happened yesterday? Help me understand."
Y at this point knows the following things:
- X didn't like what happened
- X won't tell Y what the problem is
- X has been thinking about this
- X wants an explanation from Y
All of which is far too cloak-and-dagger for effective team-building.
Every scholar of leadership from Thucydides to Simon Sinek has come to the same conclusion: that successful organizations are built on trust. Using the power of a supervisory position to coerce your reports into tipping their hands without you tipping your own is bad leadership.
Is it possible to ask questions and seek understanding in a more productive way? Sure. But that's just genuine empathy, which can and should be used regardless of management technique.
It should start more like this:
conversation happens between manager/managed who have built up a relationship based on trust via transparency in action and word over more than the last 12 hours
X: So yesterday [bad thing] happened, and it seems to be based on choices you made. My perception of what happened was [perception here]. I wanted to talk to you to see what the reason was, and let you explain why we did [choices].
This is, as you point out, called genuine empathy. We have to label it as 'ask to understand' (side note, I fucking hate Steven Covey), because so much management literature since the 1980's told us to remove empathy/sympathy and emotion. Injecting it back in, appropriately, is difficult for some people without a matrix or checklist.
The problem is, that checklist is often used as a substitute for the real work of managers - building relationships and guiding people to see they can do better, even when performing at their best.
The reason for why you would want to "ask to understand" is to figure out the root cause of the issue that caused the mistake/bad practice you observed in the first place.
Finding the root cause will allow you to help them address the issue effectively, because otherwise, you will just be playing a whack-a-mole game of battling against symptoms instead of the disease.
Dictate how you expect an employee to behave. Sometimes they will strongly disagree. If you or they continue to disagree then either of you can part ways.
Explaining to them why you think they should behave that way is valuable, but expecting them to understand and feel that way themselves is too much. If they can act that way, it doesn’t matter how they feel... it’s a job, not a cult.
If they can’t I don’t think there’s a high chance of them actually listening.
Instead, you ask the employee why they did that thing when it goes against company policy. "What policy?" Oops, it turns out you forgot to go over this during onboarding and there was no negligence or ill intent on the employee's part, they simply did not know about the policy and are sorry and embarrassed for inadvertently violating it.
Aren't you glad you asked them about this before coming down on them with a reprimand, blindsiding and angering them and ultimately making yourself look stupid for blaming them for your mistake?
If it turns out the employee did in fact have a grudge or was negligent, there is still time to reprimand them after hearing "their side of the story." But if you never ask you will miss explanations and needlessly escalate conflicts.
An interesting counterpoint I've heard from respected management trainers: it _is_ impossible to correctly infer intent and motivation, but fortunately intent doesn't matter here. You don't need to know it, and it focuses on the wrong thing. You don't want to know _why_, and your intervention can easily assume positive intent. What you want is to change future behavior. So assume positive intent, and focus on what to do next time.
In your example scenario, where an employee has broken corporate policy you would just say something to the effect "I'm sure you meant well here, but our policy on this is X. What can you do differently next time?" That is the conversation you should be having, rather than the blame distribution game that 'why did you do that bad thing?' invites.
It is the opposite of those things. The label applied to the approach isn't putting the words in your mouth. You don't lead with the question "I'm trying to understand why you did this. Why did you do that?"
You ask questions about the context of the situation. You listen, a lot. Then, when you have sufficient information, you decide how to act, whether it be a simple direct communication to that one person, or a this-is-who-we-are / this-is-how-we-do-things communication to the entire team.
Listening, the real technique under examination here, is the opposite of toxic. It shines light on behaviors, and helps a manager achieve the true goals of what would otherwise be a mere surface-correction. Listening is ameliorative. Asking questions, gently, and listening to the person is also not passive-aggressive. Giving the employee a bad review for uncorrected behavior is. Inquiry is one of a set of tools that any good manager should use. Not the only one, to be sure. It is not passive, it is directly aimed at increasing the situational awareness to best support a manager's judgement (maybe there's nothing here, maybe it is small/medium/large).
What kills work culture is allowing a problem to fester then blindsiding the person with bad reviews and termination. Explaining to someone early a) what the expectations are, b) how they are doing in relation to the expectations, and c) if correction is needed, how to correct and how to measure, leads to a much healthier work environment.
Several years back I took a "Crucial Accountability" course on having accountability conversations. In their process there were four phases to every accountability conversation: 1) Reiterate the expectation 2) Describe the incident in question 3) Ask the employee to describe the gap between the expectations and their behavior in the incident 4) Have a conversation about what we're going to do about it.
I've used this model many times and it is very effective. Usually the employee leaves the conversation understanding what I expect and assures me that they will try to do better. Sometimes it requires follow-up correction, or further conversations, and sometimes it requires an action-plan that we work on together. Rarely does it lead to an untenable disagreement in how things should be done (and you can guess where that leads). Also rarely, the expectations will be amended or more clearly expressed to everyone.
I do think getting their perspective is necessary to understand if the expectations were incorrect, or if my understanding of the incident was incorrect. But it is essential that the conversation always start with reiterating the expectations.
Professional behaviour doesn't necessarily mean being a dick or hoarding information. In my book, this is playing the organization worse off. You yourself might be better off, to the detriment of everyone else around you. This I view as unprofessional, becoming of some external consultants, not regular employees in a supportive organization.
Feedback should not name people. You might name roles or groups instead, preferably just state events as they factually happened, without pointing blame or fingers. What happened happened, and now we deal with that. Just assume people are learning on the job. Some people take things too hard by default, so instead reassure them the company is coping as a business.
Sometimes, information is illegal to share, or when personal or too much detail, it is oversharing. But in general, sharing information is a safety net. People work better and do better, when provided enough context to thrive. To know the difference, you must put yourself in other people's roles, what they should know and not. If you overshare technical details, some people will become uneasy, so you share what they are comfortable knowing. Some people abuse information, so they need less information to abuse.
To "correct" someone, first make sure you know their intentions and why they did as they did. It's not about being right or wrong always. Treat people as you'd want to be respected. Assume that, given new information, people continually learn or casually, mention good learning resources. Your best efforts won't make others learn. The best teachers let other people draw their own conclusions.
Empathy
Also, sometimes, its not worth bringing up issues - someone could really just be having a bad day.
I think with managing people its best to be direct but proportionate. As long as your reports know that they can take it up with you if they need clarification or don't agree you should be fine.
So I guess it came across as odd.
Ensure people understand, in general, that when you are correcting them you are doing it for a good reason and that it is always intended to help the other person AND the team.
Ensure people understand you are always asking for the same treatment. Make a point to regularly show you follow up on constructive criticism.
Don't be too serious when giving criticism. The only time to be serious is when the offense is grave and career ending, you are his/hers superior, and even then only maybe.
Never give criticism without honestly complimenting for something else.
Never give criticism without honestly giving reasons why you think it was necessary and in the best interest of the person you give criticism to.
Never give criticism without seriously considering the point of view of the person you plan to give criticism to.
Never give criticism immediately. The times you avoid mistakes when giving criticism will make up for the fact you need to exercise your willpower to wait. If you can't do that, you are probably not a good person to give criticism anyway.
I normally write down what I think needs some feedback then leave it until the next weekly 1:1. I think sleeping on something like this leaves me in a much better state to deal with in a reasonable way.
This event sounds like a wonderful opportunity to have a 1:1 conversation with the person and tell a story to help them grow.
Before talking to your team member, set your own tone internally. This conversation should be friendly, helpful, and constructive. No one should walk away feeling bad about things, but instead leave having strengthened your alignment and hopefully learned something in the process.
First, ask them how they think the message they sent was received. Be open to learning new things, such as an intent that wasn't clear to you, or some other details about the interaction that aren't immediately obvious to you. Also be open to and prepared for them to already know there was a problem with it. Paraphrase it back to them if you don't understand something they said.
Next, talk through a similar story from your past where you sent a message with similar problems. It doesn't have to be an email, but it's important for you to talk through how you made a similar error. The key is how you identified the problem and identified a better way to handle things in the future.
If you honestly and thoughtfully have this conversation with your valuable team member, you will develop empathy and trust that will not only help them learn from the experience, but give both of you a better working relationship for the future.
> ... I decided to reprimand him for his email
It's not clear from the post what's the status differential of the involved. Is the author a manager, mentor or superior to the team member mentioned?
If there's not much of the differential, then taking such a formal approach (company emails are records!) is indeed an odd way to react to this. After all, the assessment of the "tone" is a judgement call.
If author was a superior by rank, then it's a matter of upholding the internal policies, which should not start with a "reprimand" but communicating the policies, giving training, helping to adopt it. This process can as well be delegated to avoid direct confrontation and unnecessary tension and guilt. Putting someone in a hot seat to "help me understand" is something from Great Inquisitor's playbook.
Didn't someone assign that less experienced team member to deal with the reply to the external contact? Let _that_ person deal with the fallout accordingly.
If you are giving feedback to an experienced, emotionally mature coworker who trusts your judgment and knows you respect them, you can just concisely tell them what you mistake you think they made, and leave it at that.
If you are giving feedback to a recent graduate who has a lot of raw talent but is inexperienced, still working to improve their own self-confidence, and doesn’t know you very well yet, then it is wise to take the time to communicate very clearly. That means not making them think something is an enormous problem, when actually it is only a small problem.
Some people will have teams of only one of these types of people and think “h the right way to handle this is X” but in my experience it is situational and different people work better with different types of communication.
"Your email had appeared to have a slightly sarcastic ring to it, while everyone interprets sarcasm differently I found it to be unprofessional towards the clients, can you please ensure that you review the tone of your emails such that they're not misunderstood?
Saying you're unhappy about it sounds weak and emotional in this context. Happiness isn't expected from an email in this context.
As a note: Grammarly says this is 4/5 in terms of formality (very strong intensity) and dishearting 2/5 (moderate intensity).
> Happiness isn't expected from an email in this context
What I mean to say is that I, personally would be unsatisfied (unhappy) with sarcasm as a tone towards a client.
> I found it to be unprofessional towards the clients,
It is not always understood that it is bad to be "unprofessional towards the clients", do not take it for granted that everyone knows that. In fact this person in the original example probably did not.
In my experience, while internally, one can be informal, even joke a bit and still be respected for technical ability, it is necessary to take a more formal approach outside of the org in order to be taken seriously.
I think that there are two uses of this type of communication:
- One or more of the parties doesn't really give a shit about the other party's opinions, so a negotiation is the only conversation to be had.
- One or more of the parties is generally incapable of having a disagreement with somebody without it upsetting them.
I think that one or both of these describes a large percentage of workplace conversations, which is why 'non violent communications' is so useful, but they are both bad situations that we should strive to fix, not work around.
(I treat separately a third case where NVC style is useful - one or more of the parties is an asshole - since I think it's pretty generally understood that this is a situation that needs to be fixed.)
> [...] I think that the primary effect of this communication style is actually to inhibit real discussion of the issues at hand, by making the needs/wants of the various parties the center of the conversation and immediately moving away from an open dialog and into a negotiation.
Hmm, would a simple fix be to pause at one of the earlier steps and ask for clarification? For example, after step 2: "Does that seem like a reasonable or understandable reaction?"; after step 3: "What do you think of all the above?" Is it really taught to always deliver it all in one go?
(Background: I've heard several people describe NVC and have read a bit, but haven't taken an official class. I also wouldn't be surprised if there is wide variance between "NVC in theory", "NVC as taught by this or that person", and "NVC in practice".)
Remember its a business with business goals. Not to be heartless but to earn pay, some performance is required.
The details aren't important so much as the idea that as you go from outer to inner you go from objective and observable to subjective and hidden, and that in any critique of a colleague you should as far as possible stick to the concrete and observable (as per the "late-to-standup" observation) and strictly avoid as far as possible the temptation to make statements about the more "inner" zones such as "I feel you have a casual attitude about punctuality" where endless and unresolvable recrimination and debate can ensue, often mistaken for real and valuable discussion by those doing the criticising, since reduced visibility in these zones can easily lead to facile assumptions and insufficient comprehension on the part of the critiquer.