Meena’s Marketing Mayhem
Meena’s team design all the posters and brochures for Funky Town’s clothing stores. They are a bit of a creative bunch and when you walk down that end of the office and there are clothes strewn everywhere, posters stacked in corners and brochure lay outs pinned up. It looks like organised chaos!
Meena came to see me and explained she was having issues with two of her team. The first is Ben who is very enthusiastic but seems to want to be the Head of Marketing instead of his actual role of Marketing Assistant. He is refusing or putting off work that he has called ‘boring’ even though Meena has asked him to complete these tasks and explained why they are important.
Maggie is a different performance problem. She’s very quiet and methodical and works through all the graphic design and wording on our adverts but is taking forever to get things done. Meena just wants to shout at her to hurry up!
So I said to Meena that she needs to have a performance discussion with Ben and Maggie (separately, not together!!). I emailed her our performance plan template and I thought it would all be sorted. Now I find that 6 weeks later Meena hasn’t done anything and things are worse.
Plus my manager Chris has asked me to follow up all our retail managers who had employees who rated below target in the last round of performance reviews. So this morning I called three of them and find they all have employees with performance issues. They talked to me for what seemed like hours, complaining long and hard to me about how difficult these employees are being and why can’t they just get better.
I still have 57 managers to ring and I can see this ballooning out of control!! Does anyone have any suggestions on policies or procedures I can put in place or ways I can start these managers dealing with poor performance when clearly they don’t want to deal with it and just want it to magically disappear? Please help me!
>>> Post your advice as a comment below. In the December issue of the HumanResources magazine we’ll publish the best answers and see what Flora does.
Your issue is one we see all the time in the workplace as most manager’s are either not equipped or unwilling to deal with poor performance, so may attempt a discussion but never follow it up. here’s what our team of HR Advisors does:
1. Provide support to the managers.
2. Arrange all the meetingns and all the follow up sessions with the manager and respective staff.
3. Facilitate the meetings.
4.Prepare the minutes/letters etc following all discussions.
5. Prepare the warnmings etc.
5. Arrange training/coaching sessions with the staff to ” improve”.
Benefits for the Managers:
1. They are not the ” bad guy”.
2. They don’t have to do all the ” HR work” work so can concentrate on the day to day ” product/service ” delivery.
3. Each play to their strengths.
4. Businesses can stop trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
5. Over time , with this process, the managers start to “get it” and you will see them start doing some of this for themselves, once they get the hang of it!!
Thanks Carol,
That sounds fantastic. My only issue is trying to find the time to support all my managers when they haven’t been dealing with poor performance! Is one HR Advisor to 400 employees enough? It doesn’t feel like it!!
Hi Flora,
To me it sounds like you have a performance issue with your managers so you really need to tackle it from the top down.
I’m making an assumption that you have a performance management structure for all employees and therefore have specific goals and targets in place for the individual Managers.
A specific competency for Managers is teamleading and staff supervision.
By doing a performance review with them on what the company expectations are of them as Managers, you should be able to identify to them what the expectations are of them and the subsequent management of their teams.
Taking them through the process first will also re-focus them on the best way to discuss the current challenges and successes in their own teams and enable them to identify what the expectations of existing team members is at this time.
In performance reviews is important to focus on what is working well for the business and the team as well as area’s for improvement. It may turn out in the Manager’s reviews that certain managers may need a little training in leadership and if this is the case then it is essential to line up some training programs. If cost is prohibitive then look at running an in-house session with the whole management team.
It might be worth putting in mentoring programmes where you team up Managers with excellent performance reviews with those that don’t. Then the less experienced managers have someone to discuss issues with and are not putting unrealistic demands on your time.
When people are not meeting expectations it is usually a case of lack of skills in a certain areas. This can be easily rectified and is usually a lot cheaper than the cost of recruiting.
By documenting the process through performance reviews, identifying where you need to give additional support and ensuring every opportunity to gain any essential skills that are needed to help employees meet expectations, then the option of letting people go may have to be looked at. If this happens then you know you have taken every reasonable step to prevent it from happening but at the end of the day, it’s not fair on the team for one person to not be performing!
The regularity of performance reviews can vary from company to company. Some people prefer regular contact weekly whereas others prefer a maximum of six monthly. Let your employees set the time frame if they are hitting expectations but where you have a problem it will need to be a frequent meeting. The aim is to bring the person up to speed not “manage them out”. If they are not up to the job, no matter how nice they are, they will manage themselves out and there will be nothing you can do about it if you offer all the support and training you can.
I note from the previous comment that time management is an issue for you but if you don’t re-inforce the concept that managers need to step up as well as their teams, you will continue to have upto 400 people trying to get your time.
It will ultimately save time. Surely not all 60 managers can have problems. Start with the ones you know about and I think you’ll find word starts to get around. I think the ratio will drop dramatically within a few days as people start re-focusing.
Good luck.
Hi Cherilyn,
Flora.
Thank you! You’re right – not every manager has problem employees and focusing them on the process and the point of reviews is a great way to start.
I also love the mentoring idea of pairing up someone who is good at doing with reviews with someone who needs development and I’m sure doing this is going to cut down on the time I have to spend on this, and acknowledge those managers who are doing a great job!
And I read somewhere you have to say something 7 times before someone remembers – so I think going over the review process again will refresh my managers on it!