Robert Statsky

Performance Management

It’s incredibly important as a manager to care for the success of your employees. Too many people get into management because they feel it is less work and more money. If you think you can order people around and “delegate” you can be a good manager.

Real leadership has nothing to do with delegation. A leader makes someone better. I’ve always said that anyone can manage but not everyone can lead. A leader cares for the well-being of others and wants others to be successful. That is the mental shift you make.

When assessing when someone is ready for leadership, I always make sure to determine whether this individual knows it will be harder than managing themself. Once someone realizes that leading and inspiring others is more difficult than doing the job on their own, they are ready to consider leadership.

So how do you get someone to do better? If you have no desire to do that, or if you’re only interested in KPIs and barking orders, you’re not going to be successful for very long. Not everyone is an A player all the time, and in fact you can have an A player that becomes a B or a C player or worse due to outside of work circumstances. Or maybe someone strange happens like a war in their country or a global pandemic. Those are all things I never thought I would have to contend with in my career but I’ve seen drastic transformations in performance.

Its the role of the leader to recognize all of this and elevate their employees regardless. Before you can actually make people do better, you have to WANT them to, and have a desire as a leader to support them. Otherwise the employee is not the problem.

Now we can’t all always be perfect at all times. That won’t work, but you need to want your employees to improve. Most leaders I’ve worked for failed because they don’t have a vested interest in their employee’s success. If you look too much inward and have a lack of empathy or an inability to turn an employee around, then you’re probably in the wrong role.

Steps for Improvement:

1. Make sure you have regular conversations with the employee. Speak with them, care about what they are telling you and get an understanding of what drives that person.
2. If they aren’t performing find out why that might be happening and be direct with them.
3. Without prying into specifics ask if something outside of work is affecting them, and if they need support or help from someone else to get them through it. Be it HR, leadership, guidance from someone.
   1. You can’t solve all problems with an employee but you have to have a vested interest in directing them to where they can get the support they need to keep going and improve.
4. Once you’ve isolated why you think performance is suffering, work with the employee to ensure they understand it. Do this by asking them questions.
   1. How do you feel about your performance lately?
   2. What would you like to improve upon?
   3. Do you think things are going in the right direction?
   4. What do you want to work on changing?
   5. What is currently holding you back?
   6. What support do you need from me to ensure you can do your best?
5. Asking how you can support them is the first step. You are offering them the hand, it is their responsibility to take it.
   1. This should be consistent for however many times you speak with them.
   2. If things are going quite horribly you might need to speed the process up, but its important to stay on the employee and support them, and let them know you are there for them and their success.
6. Many times you might have someone who underperforms and after working with them, they improve again temporarily to only slip back into their old habits.
   1. While frustrating this is also quite common, so make sure to stay on top of the situation and continue to work with them over time. If there isn’t consistent, long-standing improvement, you might want to consider a performance improvement plan.
7. Break the larger problem into smaller fixable tasks.
   1. Identify them with the employee and create an action plan for success
   2. Put these in bullet points and action items for each 1:1 interaction.
   3. Have the employee report their KPIs and metrics and successes to you consistently.
8. Track this for as long as necessarily until you see improvement, or you move to a performance improvement plans.