Leadership
If an employee does not function appropriately, then what?
It often happens: An employee does not function well. There is a lot of irritation, both with the worker and with his supervisor and nobody is happy with that situation. The manager-in-charge would prefer the worker to go; the worker would prefer another job but neither take enough action to realize that. Nor does either of them speak out to the other. In this way a situation is created wherein everybody is beating about the bush, is dissatisfied and will remain that. More often than not nothing happens: there is balance, but an unwanted balance indeed.
How do you change that: How do you deal with this?
What you want actually is that the employee functions well again:
That's the easiest, takes the least time and energy and therefore the least money. But parties are no longer on speaking terms.
Outside assistance sometimes helps: In our role as an outsider - an advisor - we often have the possibility to get the relationships back on track. Our position here is always that the company is number one.
But of course it is also important to change the relationships in such a way that the work environment is one of professionalism, of cooperation and leads to somewhere and of work pleasure.
What then is the role of this outsider?
This is how we do it: We like to make a concise analysis based on interviews. Show the bottlenecks. We talk to the key staff and of course to the worker that does not function optimally. In the first instance we present our findings to our client and later to all concerned. In this process we make sure that the relationship between the supervisors and the rest of the staff remains as it should be: The boss is the boss and remains the boss. We focus our conversations on the expectations that one has of the others or one may have and about the conditions under which the cooperation can become optimal again.
Now we are really stern: good intentions are not enough: It must really work now. If everything fails then one can come to only one conclusion: The worker goes.
We say this aloud in the presence of the manager- in-charge and the employee.
After these solid deals we record everything in detail so that a dossier is formed with which the supervisor has enough arguments to be able to start dismissal procedures if things don't work out in the end. However, it hardly ever gets to this stage: In most of the cases a good and workable situation is created and if not, the worker often goes of his own accord.
The advantage of this approach is that the company reaches a good and workable situation quickly and without too much emotion. Outsiders are very forceful in situations like this. And if after all this no workable situation proves to be possible this is clear quite soon, the next stages are discussed in advance and everybody is aware of the consequences. And there is a dossier with the arguments that prove that a workable situation is no longer possible.
Clarity first and for everybody: This approach is almost always seen as fair and honest, both by supervisors and by workers.
Jan Boeren
