Managing and Motivating Challenging Employees
8 steps to motivate team members to exhibit superstar qualities.
Step 5 – What are the facts? As you seek help from your support team, insure you have all of the facts you need, as well as specific examples from your support team. The most powerful knowledge you have are real life examples that will help the employee see how their behavior is working against them.
Step 6 - What are the steps that the employee must achieve in order to reach the desired outcome? Write out the steps – in your opinion - that the employee must take to change their behavior. This is not the final plan, but it will be the conversation started for your meeting. Once you have opened the conversation with the employee, and you talk about steps that they can take to improve, then seek their assistance in editing the steps with their suggestions for improvement. Adding ideas from the employee will always make the outcome more successful since they will be “invested” in the plan.
Step 7 – What tools can you provide to help the employee achieve the desired outcome? With the plan in place, identify some tools that might help the employee stay on track and motivated. This can be task lists, performance plans, weekly meetings, mentoring, coaching, peer group meetings or in extreme cases an outside professional councilor. These tools will help the employee and you stay accountable to the plan that you developd.
Step 8 – When is the follow up meeting? Never leave the meeting without a specific, written follow up meeting scheduled.
You are now armed with the information you need to deal with those challenging employees that are in your firm today. The overall situation they are in comes down to 2 possible outcomes that you as the leader can help them achieve; 1) agree to a roadmap to success where they stay with the firm as an active and productive team member or 2) allow them to find new opportunities outside the firm. It all begins with the leaders commitment to have a strategic conversation.
