The Coaching Cafe Podcast

Coaching for tricky performance conversations

• Open Door Coaching

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We continue our focus on annual performance review season in this week’s Coaching Café Podcast and how these conversations can build engagement in the workplace. So far, we’ve shared frameworks and tips to set up conversations for success. Now it’s time to talk about the trickier conversations. 

A frustrated manager recently asked us:
“What do you do about people who think they’re meeting expectations, but they aren’t?
Or worse, they don’t have goals. They’re not engaged. They’re just working to retirement. You still have to write something on the form!” 

We hear this all the time and it’s exactly where coaching can help. 

This week, join Natalie and Paula as we explore how a coaching approach can shift even the most challenging performance conversations. 

You’ll walk away with: 

  • An understanding of how/why conversations become difficult 
  • Strategies for reframing these conversations 
  • A practical tool from Open Door you can use right away 

Whether you’re designing performance conversations, coaching managers, or facing your own review – you will benefit from learning how to coach through the difficult conversations. 

If you are a regular, you know the vibe and the great contribution that you make to our discussions; so we look forward to welcoming you back and offering you a value-packed 30 minutes each Tuesday. 

If you’ve not joined us for a Coaching Café Podcast, now is your opportunity to schedule this time for your professional and personal development.   In no time at all, you’ll be looking forward to Tuesdays, just like we all do! 

Thanks for listening! If you enjoyed the podcast please leave us a 5 star review where ever you listened to us! It helps promote the podcast to streaming services and other listeners.

Watch the webinar of this episode or read the blog by visiting our website.

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[Music] Welcome to the Coaching Cafe podcast.[Music] Today, join Nallian Paula as they discuss difficult performance conversations. Today, you will walk away with an understanding of how/why conversations become difficult and a practical tool from Open Door you can use right away. We hope you enjoy the podcast. If you do, please consider leaving a five-star review.[Music] We acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians on the lands on which we meet today and they continue to connect into the land, borders and communities of Australia. We pay our respects to them, their elders past, present and emerging. Well, it's a very good morning, it's a good afternoon and it's a good evening to you. Wherever you are listening to our Coaching Cafe all around the world, apparently it's a beautiful spring evening in California, but it's freezing here in Melbourne and on the morning to finish your first fall. So we've just done our weather check and we've got people dialing you from all around the world. Welcome. My name is Natalie Ashdown. Welcome to the Coaching Cafe. Welcome to our dear, dear, a residential HR manager, Paula Jones-Hunt. Thanks for joining us again, Paula. Lovely to be here. And today we are talking about Coaching for tricky performance conversations. And here's a very popular topic by the looks of how many people we have joining us here or on your favorite streaming. So let's get into it. Well, we have a lot to talk about today. We are in performance conversation season for those people that are doing those mid-year performance conversations. And today we're talking about tricky conversations. So we've been talking about the different conversations over the last few weeks around performance conversation season. We've talked about strengths-based conversations. We've had a good conversation about all those. Today we're getting into the tricky stuff. So let's see how we go. We are seeing this season of performance conversations as an opportunity to build engagement and we'll tell you why. But for those of you that are new, welcome. We are all about creating a community. We come here only every Friday. We had the week off last week. But I'll become here nearly every Friday at this time to build a community to share our thoughts, our knowledge, our experience, grow ourselves as coaches, have thought provoking conversations. And many of you are collecting your CFD ease for free. They're available at the end of the session if you'll listen to this live. So why do we care about this topic? I'm glad you asked. Well, what we know from the research is that only 14% of employees agree that the performance reviews that they receive during this time inspire them to perform better. Only 14% of employees strongly agree that the reviews they receive inspire them to perform better. I'm just repeating that for effect. Only 26% of employees strongly agree that they're accurate. And only 29% of employees agree that they're fair. So we have got a big issue here. We're going into this big performance conversation season. And pretty well, the majority of all employees think that they're not inspirational, they're not accurate and they're not fair. So these are statistics from last year from gallop.com, go to CliftonStrengths and go to gallop.com and look at all the research that they have there. They have researched thousands of employees over hundreds of organizations. The data is very consistent year on year. So this is a worry. We have been talking for the last couple of weeks about the perfect storm. We know in Australia, this is the data from last year, but the data was backed up again for this year in the global gallop state of the nation global workforce reports. For our colleagues in America, for our colleagues in Canada, for our colleagues in New Zealand, Japan, you're all listening, our Indian colleagues on the line, gallop.com, the state of the global workforce has got your country broken down into countries. So today I'll talk about Australia, but please go to that report, go to the detailed report and you will actually get the statistics for your country. You can see where your country is performing better than the rest of the world. And you can see where your the whole of your country is actually less than other areas in the world, but we're looking at Australia and New Zealand. Most employees, they say 67% of employees in Australia and New Zealand are quiet quitting. Now, what this means is employees are feeling a seat, they're watching the clock, they're putting in the minimum effort required as far as the disc connected from their employer, they're minimally productive, but they're also more likely to be stressed out, burnt out, then then gauged workers, they're feeling lost and disconnected from their workplace. So it is what we call the perfect storm because you've got performance, conversation, season, and at the same time that we are trying to address engagement in the workplace. And so I remind us of this picture in the background here where this is the summer season in Australia where we had these stormy days and we sent the nippers, the surf life savers, the junior surf life savers out into the water with their water. It feels at the moment like a lot of us are coaching, you know, like the water safety people looking after our managers and it is very stormy, the season rough, the stormy weather. Now, there's many organizations that we work with where the engagement scores are in the top 10% of lot of organizations, in fact most of organizations we work, they have the engagement scores in the top 10%, which is wonderful. What are they doing? They're coaching, they're focusing on strengths, they're doing leader and coach programs, all of these great programs that actually build engagement. And of course that is our band work and isn't it really that's what we're trying to do. Paula, I'll see you smiling and nodding, tell me what your reaction to this is at the moment, they're more talk about tricky conversations. Yeah, I think there's lots of people who are, look, I think there's organizations doing great work and I don't think any organization is sitting there thinking how do we create the perfect storm for people. I think lots of people are trying to do lots of things, but the facts are is that we've got 67% two thirds of our workforce who are not engaged and are actively, you know, quite quitting and their productivity is low. I just look at all the lost opportunity that is available for the individual plus the organization that's just gone ski. And I was actually thinking of, I put my little HR head on for a minute, even the term performance review and I wonder if there's an opportunity to reframe how we think about a performance review and I was thinking about what if we were looking at performance reflections and future planning as opposed to performance review, which sounds like you're going to be measured against a bunch of criteria. Which in some respects you are, but if you're an employee going in, does the term reflections sound better than review of the future planning pieces or often the little nugget at the end that's like, oh yeah, what are you going to, what training are you going to do this year? What if we focused on those areas as opposed to the pure review part? How might that change people's perception of the performance review process? I like it. A reframe is needed. We could definitely take a look at things like that. Yeah, thank you. So what makes the conversations tricky? What makes these performance, we say tricky? What makes the performance conversations difficult? Well, it's those things that we talked about in our last cafe that often performance conversations are annual events. There's lack of preparation. There's lack of enthusiasm for that exact reason you've offered a call or that it's like a review as opposed to opportunity to reflect. We are going to be measured against our KPIs and we are going to be measured against our performance measurements. The review piece is the tricky bit potentially. And often those conversations are unplanned discussions. They're rushed or they get rescheduled. On top of that, in our experience, a lot of the difficulty in performance conversations comes because some people are what we call overraters. They overrate their performance. They think that they're highly performing when in fact they may not be meeting the performance expectations. And what's happened to the perfect storm is because some managers aren't able to address that performance throughout the year and discuss the reality of what happening. We get to the mid year or the end of year performance review and things just get quite difficult. There's a gap in the expectations. We also experience people who don't really care about the performance of conversation time. Perhaps they're checked out. Perhaps they are quite pushing. We also have difficulties where there's surprises. So we don't want surprises. All of you that have shared your thoughts over the past few weeks have definitely said that the performance review is a summary as opposed to surprise. Here's your review. And that means that managers are underprepared. And a number of people have had bad experiences in the past. So I might not be having a bad experience with you as my manager, but I'm having these bad experiences from the past. So there's a lot going on and that's where we think it comes into this perfect storm because some managers are doing this so well. They've got those regular conversations happening. The dynamic plan is there. Team members taking responsibility breaking down those conversations into a manageable chance that encourage communication trust. People are using practical coaching frameworks to have performance conversations. But we know that a lot of it is not going well. So what's our role as leaders, as managers, what's our role as coaches. It's to help people build that consistency in terms of the conversations and help people move past these difficult conversations. We want to give you a model to do that. Many of you have seen this model. But before we do call on any reflections you'd like to offer. Yeah, I often think that I think we forget what people don't know. And in the workplace, you know, you're promoted to a manager. We either in lots of organisations don't give them the skills in order to you to in management and coaching and leadership. You are really great technical person. So now you can manage people or you know, and so we don't I think we forget how much of the skills and knowledge that we have. Having been in the coaching environment that they just don't have. And then I think about our new generations coming through who actually need more training to know what they're supposed to be doing in the workplace. And if we forget to give them that knowledge and skill and build it, then that's where I think you miss alignment comes. So if you've got new generations coming through that don't know what a performance review is, don't know what good performance looks like, don't know what those expectations are. How are we expecting them to actually meet the expectations if they don't know what they are. Yeah, very, very valid comments said. Thank you. So let's talk about what we can do about this and feel free everybody's jump into the chat if you'd like to engage in the conversation. We can pick up your comments from the chat as well. We want to do what to do. This is the cute bunny. I hope for those of you that are listening, I've got my cute Instagram photo, which is pulling a rabbit out of a hat. It's a cute bunny photo for a variety. So what to do? Do we just pull rabbits out of the hat or do we take a more coaching, more strategic, a more performance positive approach. And like you're saying, Paul, maybe there's a reframe. Let's do some performance positives. Let's focus on those kind of things as well. And what to do? We want to offer you the quality questions that we have shared with many organizations that we know are working. There are some organizations we've worked with where these questions have been built into their online performance coaching systems. So we do have to have these conversations. So let's give managers a set of questions and a set of tools that they can use. Many of you that have done our certificate for on workplace and business coaching will recognize this model from our needs analysis. So we can use this beneath analysis. Great set of questions that stand in need analysis. They also stand alone as a great set of questions. And in particular, we want to bring these questions back for performance conversations as well. Here's the start of it. Let's talk about, let's start out our performance conversation about talking about what we're proud of. Let's have a conversation about what's been going well, what the person has achieved, what they are particularly proud of, how they play to the strengths and what they would like to celebrate. So any of these questions are wonderful questions to get the party started in terms of the conversation. We can give these questions to the people that were coaching. We can give these questions to managers as preparation. So come to the conversation, come to this review, having thought about what's been going really well, what you achieved, what you're proud of. Let's talk about the strengths and how you'd like to celebrate those strengths. So we start out with those proud conversations. It gets people having the conversation. Even we've noticed those people that are quite resistant, that have really checked out. Now they could say, well, you know, what, there's nothing I'm proud of. But if we press a little bit further, well, let's talk about what you've achieved or what you think you've done really well. Oh, well, I've just done my job, you know, I've gotten paid and so even the really most resistant people, if we press a little bit more and ask about what they're proud of, this can make a real difference. Paula, why don't you take us through the next one where we start to talk about the challenges. You're listening to the Open Door Coaching Coaching Cafe podcast. And for more information on programs run by Open Door Coaching, head to our website at opendoorcoaching.com.au Now back to the podcast. Yeah, so this is where we start asking questions about where have you experienced challenges, what's been the impact of the challenges? How did you overcome those challenges? What might still be outstanding and what strengths can you call on? So again, it's also not just saying, well, where did you have problems? It's actually asking them to delve a bit deeper into it, you know, so what were the impacts of those challenges? So that you're actually getting to what might be underneath it. And I do love the question about how did you overcome the challenges? Because often it's not the fact that the challenge arise because challenges means that it's an opportunity to learn and grow. But it's what did you do that makes a difference in that space? Yes, I love that. And of course, we're offering a set of questions, but of course you can add to those questions as we go along. And one of the questions that you've hinted on there, Paula, is about learning. So you mentioned about let's make this a performance reflection. So when you reflect on here, where did you experience challenges? Or as you reflect on the year or the six months or whatever period we're talking about, what did you learn? What have you learned about yourself? What have you learned about leadership? What have you learned about managing people? So we could make it crowd challenges learning. If we like, we can, or we can put some learning questions into the crowd section. I'm not fast, as long as we're asking good quality questions, I don't mind. Next one is around improvement. And this is where, as Paula, you're talking about, we are now forward focused, which is exactly what we said. What can we focus on? What can you focus on? We'll continue with improvement. What would you like to change or do differently? What would be the benefits of the changes? And I love other questions such as what would you like to learn in the next six months? Where would you like to focus in the next six months? So that if we looked back on the six months or on the year, there's things that we can be proud of. Now, I have seen even the most rusty, resistant people respond to these questions, particularly if they've got time to reflect upon it. And I think the most important thing here is, particularly if we're authentic. So we are coaches, we're leaders, we're managers, we're people that want to grow, develop, inspire, enable people to hire to form. So if we are authentic in that, not rar, rar approach, but, you know, our authentic, genuine leadership people will respond. Paula, why don't you bring us home with the last element, which is the plan? Yeah, so this is that forward planning piece that says, what steps can you take to move forward from here? What is your plan for the next two, three, six months? And this is one, two, where we can focus on, sorry, what is your, what is your KPI plans? Like, so what are the things you have to achieve, but also how do you want to achieve them? What do you want to learn? Where it been, what area would you like to learn and grow and develop in in the next three to six months? What resources might you need to help you with this? How can you leverage your strengths over the next, whatever period it is? And what support can I provide for you over that particular point in time? I think the key thing with this as well is that these, lots of people pre-fill in their forms and then go into the meeting and then discuss the form. What the information is that goes into the form and what we're suggesting is the form needs to be filled in. It might need to be done before the meeting, depending on the process that you use. But these questions actually are a bird's eye view and overview of what and an opportunity to discuss and talk them through. So that what you're putting into the form actually makes more sense or fits better for it. So I'm not suggesting you don't have to do the form. I'm saying that the conversation that you have doesn't have to be read the form. The conversation is an opportunity to open the conversation around these particular areas. It's about reflection of the past, but it is that forward planning is actually where the engagement will come moving forward. If you forget the forward planning piece, all you've done is reflected and then that person's walking away, not necessarily engaged for what's coming next. So they're absolutely and Paula just this week I had an executive senior person send me of their form. So their form had been filled out and it was basically meet expectations, meet expectations, meet expectations, meet expectations, meet expectations, meet expectations. And there was a couple of a couple of exceeds expectations, the their person, their manager had rated them, they had rated them, they go, what I found was really lacking is everything that you've just talked about. So so what are they proud of? Where did they experience challenges? What have they learned? What are they focused on moving forward? And it felt a little bit like a school report where at the bottom you say such as such as is doing really well and should continue to focus on XYZ and lead blah blah blah. And I thought that's it. They've completed the form. They've completed the rating. And then the conversation is if the person has over rated themselves, there's exceeds expectations. And my manager has only said met expectations. Now we have to have a conversation about that. I suspect that conversation may or may not happen because they're busy people. So we've teach the form. We've done our job. We're moving on off we go. So you know, this is real. This is live. What we're talking about. We're giving tools and skills and opportunities to do it better. To do engagement better to do performance conversations better. The thing that comes up to me still though is let's play devil's advocate on this. What if I don't agree with the person so they have actually over rated themselves. They think they're particularly proud of this and particularly proud of that. But they're over rating themselves. And to that, I think we have the opportunity to say I agree that you've done this. You've achieved this. You've played to your strengths here and you can be proud of this. So we're not saying that there's nothing to be proud of. We're saying what we agree with. Then we can move into the feedback I have to share with you is that there's be challenges here, here and here. And what I would like for the focus of continuous improvement. What I'd like to view to focus on in terms of continuous improvement in this in an expiry is XYZ. We're not shaking the situation. We're not dead. We're not pretending that the situation of the under performance or the over rating. We're not saying it didn't happen. What we're saying is this is that this is what I experienced. Let's talk about the differences and we'll talk about that more in our next coaching cafe next week as well. So what are we actually do if there's like actual under performance. And so what I'd like to jump into is it possible to discuss, oh, got some great comments coming in. Thank you. It's possible to discuss the dichotomy where you ask them if they are not invested in the work. Is there a more suitable organization that would help them with a sense of belonging where they could be motivated to perform. Thank you. Thank you for bringing that up Alex because it's an uncomfortable conversation to say well if you don't like it here, find somewhere else. But what we are talking about here is where what is most energizing you. So go back to our coaching cafe from last week. What's most energizing you? How can you bring those strengths to the workplace and if your work is not energizing you, what other options do we have? So treating that person with grace and dignity and thinking about what other options do they have rather than just sitting here minding the seat. It's a very tricky conversation. It's a tough conversation, but it's so valuable. It's such a valuable conversation if our managers have the courage to have those conversations. So yes, I like what you say there. I think they're difficult conversations that important to have a suggestion. Your comment is getting a lot of ticks as well. You said performance conversations either formal reviews or informal coaching have traditionally been set up in way for employees perceive they. The conversations are being done to them. Totally agree. If we can shift the mind set to conversations being done with the employees, the employment, the engagement can lift the outcomes can shift to the positive. We give the employee ownership of their conversation. It's a their review, but that requires a positive relationship and workplace culture and thank you. Sebastian, I think it's something up for us. We want a conversation that is a mutually beneficial conversation where we're partnering with the person we're having a positive conversation where we have we've reflected ourselves as leaders in coaches. We're delivering, but if we're engaging in the conversation and the person that we're coaching is also engaging. So they're having a think about these questions. We're having a conversation rather than doing it to them. So I think you've summed it up beautifully. Thank you. Yeah, Natalie, I often say to managers, you're doing too much work in this space anyway. By asking more questions, you automatically click into engagement because you're asking the person to provide their perspective and their feelings about something. And so in actual fact, a performance review should be a manager or leader asking really great questions so that the person whose performance review it is, which I agree with Sebastian on this, is that it's their review and their opportunity to really talk about and discuss what they've done and how they've done it. And what's coming up for them. So if the manager spends more focused time on asking great questions, then you're then it's going to lift that performance review anyway. Yeah, I agree. I think it just I think the way that performance conversations and reviews are done is like old school when we were at school, you know, you bought a phone, the school report. Anyway, the lighted or you didn't like it. And I think that's what makes the conversation tricky and it is all that under preparation. So it said that I know that everyone on the line is listening and will think well, it's obvious isn't it. But as leaders and coaches, we need to bring this through our workplaces because when we've got 67% disengagement and most people think that their performance reviews are not done well. They're not fair, they're not accurate and they're not inspiring. Then I don't think we can actually assume that what we know as leaders and coaches is actually out there in our workplaces. So lots of opportunity for us to make a difference. I think is the message there as well. Well, the good news is these comes from Gallup's recent report as well that we can ensure that all managers receive training to cut this engagement in half. So training in performance conversations less than half of the world's managers say that they receive enough management trainings. That's what it's suggested on Paula. And of course, we can teach effective coaching techniques to boost performance by 20 to 28%. And yes, and that comment that you mentioned there, Paula, that the manager or the coach is doing all the hard work. We need to shift that balance so it's that it's a partnership when we have these conversations. Sebastian saying if we're doing it from a coach is perspective of the danger, if the coach is working harder than the coach, he exactly keep in mind that not all performance conversations are a coaching opportunity. Indeed, they might just be put it on the table and let's discuss it. So yes, Angela, will you have a future cage in cafe exploring what some of the cultural economic issues causing disengagement globally? Hmm, I like you thinking this standby. Look, if we can do that, there's lots of opportunity to have that conversation together. And we have a global community as you know on the line that can do that. And there you go, everybody, let's focus on doing it better when employers provide managers training in this area. It improves managers thriving levels from 28% up to 34%. So there's lots of opportunity to do this better. And we as leaders and coaches can influence that. That's our call to action. Alrighty, everyone, well, we are right on time. These tools are included in us to get forward, place and business coaching. They're expanded in our diploma of leadership coaching. So if those things are of interest to you, please join us. It would be wonderful to have you involved. For now, we say thank you for joining us and enjoy your coaching. We look forward to catching up with you at our next coaching. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Coaching Cafe podcast. You can watch the full video of this podcast on our website. I'll put a link in the show notes. We'll see you at the next Coaching Cafe.[Music]