What To Do With A Bored Poor Performer

Ahoy legend. Welcome to a another episode of the Team Buffalo podcast. I'm your host, Travis Thomas. Today we're going to do what we do each day, which is to dive into a leadership question that you've posed to try and figure out what would we suggest doing in that scenario? And what are some practical tips and takeaways? As leaders, certain issues are particularly challenging, some are pretty straightforward. But quite often things are complicated. And today's question is a complicated one. So they have mine on the questions, I feel terrible performance managing someone who is of an older generation, someone who is in their late years in the kind of 60s going into 70s, is looking at the retirement track, but it's not performing particularly well. So the kind of details on this, which are important to include, and I'll summarize here, longtime employee, I've been the line manager for that person for a number of years, they've been a long term employee during that time, before their time, they expressed that they were going to retire. But some things have gone on, there's no more part time work allowance in the organization. So we can't offer them that as a thing. And they don't want to retire now, because they have nothing else to do with their time, they're going to be bored. They've said they're worried about being bored. So why not continue to earn money and just be in the workplace? Interesting, right? So you know, some of you may have faced this before, I have managed multiple generations. But when I wasn't managing in the corporate world, and as a consultant, I've encountered this a number of times across organizations. And first we'd want to look at motivation, I think is always a good place to start. But that's pretty clear. The person has said, Well, I'm just doing this because I'm kind of bored. That's okay, if someone's a little bit bored and doing something because they're bored. But the question we have to ask ourselves is, are they doing it to the right standard? That's a different thing. Right? If they're doing it to the right standard, then that's okay. But if they're not doing it to the right standard, well, what the heck are we going to do about it as a leader? And clearly that's the case here. They're not interested in meeting that, and we have to do something about it. So what do we do? First off, I think this should be a pretty clear first step is we need to have a sit down with this person who's named Joe, with the Joe, we got to sit down and get clear on what Joe, you've been here a long time you've been in the organization, you've done the things you need to do, we're, you know, we understand, you understand what good performance in this particular role looks like. But you're not quite meeting that performance. Now, I always say to leaders, I've got a framework that I put together a number of years ago and delivers, well, I always say to them with these types of conversations, you need to do the prep. So with our difficult conversations framework, there's four key areas we look at, and I call it OF IT. The idea is you look at observations, what are the things I can see that Joe is doing, that are causing problems or causing him to miss the mark? Feelings and what my job be feeling in terms of why he's performing that way and what he's trying to achieve? You know, he said, he's feeling bored. And so he comes to work because he's bored. Well, how am I feeling? And how are others around him feeling about his poor performance? Then we move to we've got observations and feelings, then we move to impacts. That's the "I" for impact. So what are the implications and impacts of this style of performance and this particular behavior set what's happening to the people around him and to you, as a leader, as a result of the things that he's doing and how he's choosing to perform? And then the T is for targets? We need to set some clear targets for Joe, if he's poor performing, we would assume that he's missing targets, because otherwise, how can someone be a poor performer if there are targets and standards they're meant to meet? But just in case there aren't, or if there are, and we haven't reinforced them, we need to be really clear on what those targets are. So that's a bit observations, feelings, impacts or implications if you prefer, and targets super useful, really, quite simplistic framework, but good in what it does. And it works really well. Even actually, just a couple of hours before this, I was delivering a workshop to a number of leaders on how to have these particular conversations. And they found the framework incredibly useful and applied it in real scenarios to solve that. So we have that conversation with Joe, we invite him to the conversation, we have it. And what do we want Joe to walk away with? Well, we want Joe to walk away with a commitment to that performance standard. So some people might say, well, like Joe said, he's not really in it for the job. There. He's just doing it because he bored. Well, I'd ask you as a leader, does that give Joe a pass? Your job is bored, and he's doing it to entertain himself, you know, is that fair? You know, could you turn up and just say, I'm just going to do what I feel like doing or how I feel like performing because I'm just here because the alternative is quite boring me hanging at home is boring and and I do kind of want to income. No way. That's fun. That's freaking crazy, you can't do that. So I'd say to you, what would you do for any other member of your team? What would you say to Sally? Or what would you say to anyone else who's in the same category or a different category, but performing under your remit? You would say, well, this isn't good enough, hopefully, if not, then we've got a broader conversation about your leadership and standards. But I'm sure that's not the case. So you have that conversation with Joe, then what you need to do with that T, the letter T remembers for targets is we need to set a target for performance. And we need to set a timeline for him to meet that performance threshold. So if I say to Joe, look, I want to see your performance go from level one to level three, or whatever, you know, from 80%, on this KPI to 90%, I need to tell him by when. Because if I say to him, I want you to 80% or 90% could take a month, they could say, well, I'm working on I'm working on it, no, I won't commitment to a certain timeframe. So be specific about what I need, you know, all the smarter goal stuff, be specific, Joe, I need you to perform at this level, how we get there, I'll give Joe some permission to be creative. And in some of the standards of the way he executes on that, but he needs to hit those targets. And if you hit those targets, I give them positive price. So Joe, great, you know, I'm so glad you're still on the team. It's been good having you here, you know, I really appreciate your performance and the adjustment in the performance that you've made. And if Joe doesn't meet the standards, then what would you do? What do you think, what what would your response be? Well, hopefully your response would be, well, let's get Joe back in the room again, and have the conversation again, hey, Joe, you know, you've missed the target, or you've missed the interim target, which is even better, because then we're not waiting a whole quarter a month for him to miss it. You're Joe, you've missed the interim target. We need to talk about this, again, we need to talk about what specifically happened, what were the observations? And what were the impacts of that? And then what's the new target? Or if it's the same target, Joe, when you're going to hit this target by? Does he have all the skills to do it? Are the processes clear? Of course, yes, because he's done it in past. So if nothing else has changed, aside from his retirement aspirations, then Joe, you gotta hit this target. Then after that interim target passes again. So this is the second one, we come to a point where I'd say a couple of things might happen. One is he might hit the target goes, Oh, you're not going to leave me alone about this, are you? Okay, I'll meet the target. If he doesn't meet the target. And you can see that happening, you start bothering him again, you say, Joe, just so you know, if you don't hit this target for this quarter, it's actually a formal performance warning you need to go out or a formal warning that you'll receive, because you're missing targets for consecutive months, that might wake him up. Or, you know, if those two don't work, the third thing that will happen, and this is a possibility, and I've seen it happen is Joe will continue to miss performance until either he gets tired of you harassing him and he quits. Or he gets tired of you harassing him and you perform really manage and out because he's not willing to leave and not willing to change. That sucks, right? I mean, I had that conversation today. And the difficult conversations workshop we had earlier is that sometimes the answer is performance management. But let's do those other things. So to summarize, let's use the OF IT framework. And to get really clear on observations, feelings, impacts and targets that we want to see for Joe, we need to be really clear and walk through that in the difficult conversation, then we need to follow up and continue to manage that process and his performance against that process. And then once all of that is said and done, you should have an outcome that either means he's lifted his performance to meet your targets, or he's failed to lift to those targets. And you're now managing him towards either him choosing to leave or you having to formulate manage him out. I know that's not easy. I've sat in that seat having to performance manage people, every good leader has at one point or another, recognize that some people it's not about skill, it's not about process, it's actually about their will to change, and you have to manage them out because they're not willing to change. So I think that's super important to keep in mind. That's it for today's one leadership question about what to do and how to performance manage someone or manage someone's performance, who is not meeting expectations. Now if you enjoyed today's episode, I encourage you to subscribe for more you can check out also our great newsletter on teambuffalo.co/newsletter and sign up there. We've even got a kick a$$ referral program where you can get all kinds of cool rewards and tools and whatnot for referring other subscribers. Check it out and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Have a good one.