Tips for Providing Constructive Criticism to Underperforming Employees

Introduction

As a leadership trainer who often engages with executives of SMEs, I am able to share some insights into how to to deal with under-performing managers. It also helps that I am the founder and CEO of Britannia Education Group, so get to provide effective feedback to my managers in order to lift their performances.

It is important to understand that constructive feedback at executive level is quite different from the one that is given at tactical or operational level. This is because an executive’s feedback would mostly be for middle level managers who are experienced and mature enough to understand the situation and can take the feedback at face value.

1. Be honest

Being honest with your managers should be the very first step. First, they would be experienced enough to sense your honesty and would match it with theirs, so that there could be an open discussion about what exactly is going wrong and what are the realistic options on the table. In contrast, giving them a false version of reality would mean that they might try to do the same, and that would take the two of you a step away from the solution.

For example, I once had a meeting with a Sales manager about not converting enough leads despite that both the number and quality of leads had improved recently. He asked me how bad the performance of his team was, to which I replied with a smile “probably the worst in a long time”. I followed that up with an assurance that I was happy to work with him to do everything in my power to bring the team back on track. This helped us to establish rapport and trust between us, that allowed us to explore different ways to improve our conversion rate. Not everything we agreed upon worked as intended, but we were still able to improve the conversion rate to an acceptable level.

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2. Focus at the core of the problem

If you are having a discussion with your manager about performance, it’s unlikely to be a one-off isolated issue or else the manager would have solved it or a colleague would have helped. Now that you are involved, be patient and try to look at the root cause of the problem.

I once had a meeting with an academic team member, about a verification visit that did not result in a very favourable verification report. When investigating the root causes, it turned out that the problem started before the students even started attending their courses. A few months ago, the admission criteria was softened (within acceptable levels) by the sales team to increase the number of admissions. A lot of students enrolled on the courses who had major study gaps, and hence struggled to generate the quality of assessment evidence that we had historically produced to our awarding organisations. By tracking the decline in performance to it’s route cause, we realised that it was an entirely different team mainly responsible.

3. Agree an action plan

It’s never a good idea to discuss a problem without agreeing on an appropriate line of action. As a leader, you also want to set up the right example for your managers to follow when dealing with performance related issues with their own subordinate. The idea here is not to dictate an action plan to your managers, but rather guide them to articulate one for themselves. Make them feel empowered and valued by being a mentor who is happy to share their experience with them. An action plan should be based on SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound) objectives, so that the action plan is realistically achievable within established deadlines.