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Leadership

 

Crucial Conversations – An Essential Supervisory Skill

The other day I was speaking with someone who is in a supervisory position at one of the Saskatchewan Government Crown Corporations.  This is a company with several thousand employees. (I won’t mention the name because my intention is not to criticize or embarrass, but to use this story as a learning opportunity… but you can see if it fits what is happening in your company.)  He told me about a group of managers who each supervise teams of employees working in a client service call-centre environment.  Most of the managers are young with little actual experience as one would get from working in the trenches.  The one manager had been there for several years in this role, but was in a panic because he did not know how to handle a crucial conversation with a subordinate employee.  Despite being in the role for several years this was the first time he had to deal with a performance deficit related situation.  He did not know how to proceed and had to call in someone from HR to guide and help him with what to say and how to say it.  As it turned out the HR consultant was herself a recent hire and not that well versed in providing guidance for conducting crucial conversations.  Needless to say it was not an effective interaction and the performance did not improve.

Several thoughts pop into my mind about this story:

  1. You would think that anyone in a supervisory position for several years would have had more than one instance of engaging in a performance type “crucial conversation”. How is this possible? Is it realistic that everyone in the team has been working flawlessly every day for many years?  Not likely!  If not, then what has this supervisor actually been doing in the role of a supervisor?  Where has his supervisor been during this time?  What has prevented the manager of this supervisor from noticing how the team members were (not) performing?
  2. What has not happened that this supervisor did not know how to deal with poor performance? How can someone be put into a supervisory position and for a period of several years not be given tools, coaching, training, etc to enable him to perform adequately? Providing reasonable assistance, guidance, and supervision (aka RAGS) is vital for ensuring performance of employees.  Without RAGS employees will do their own thing, money and resources will be misspent, and organizational objectives will not be attained effectively, if at all.

 

The inability of supervisors to conduct performance conversations is a critical short coming, and is actually more common than one might think.  What is in place in your organization?  What sort of training and developmental programs are in place to ensure consistent supervisory ability?  Successful programs to develop supervisory capacity must be multifaceted.  They cannot be just a “quickie” one-week course.  This is unrealistic.  Successful programs which I have seen include a course, plus a progressive developmental component which is monitored, and which is ideally combined with coaching opportunities, all of which are spread out over a period of several months.