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Do You Dread Confrontations With Employees?

By Bruce Tulgan

Brought to you by RainmakerThinking, Inc.

Most managers find that the most painful and damaging aspect of managing is when they must have very difficult conversations, even confrontations, with employees about some problem or another. They believe that being a strong manager requires or even causes these confrontations, whereas being a weak manager allows them to avoid these confrontations. This is what I call the “Myth of the Difficult Conversation.” What is the reality? Being a weak manager makes these confrontations inevitable, whereas being a strong manager means these confrontations rarely occur, and when they do happen they are not so painful after all.

The typical hands-off manager basically avoids performance problems until they can no longer be ignored. But problems always come up. And by the time a problem can no longer be avoided, the dreaded confrontation is inevitable.

Without regular daily or weekly management conversations with a strong focus, the manager has no natural venue in which to provide the employee with regular evaluation and feedback—good, bad, or neutral. Instead of regular and consistent “problem solving,” which is a good thing, dealing with problems becomes a difficult conversation to be avoided. If small problems are dealt with at all, they are dealt with lightly and in passing, which means these problems are likely to recur. When the problem recurs, it might not be noticed, it might be let to slide, or it might be dealt with again, maybe lightly and in passing. That means the problem is likely to recur again. Sometimes small problems that recur incessantly cause managers to finally explode in an outburst of frustration or anger. Other times small problems recur incessantly and become part of the fabric of the workplace. But some small problems fester and grow. Over time, they become large problems.

By the time most “performance improvement” conversations actually take place, it’s usually too late for the manager to be very effective. For one thing, solving a problem after it has already festered and grown large is so much more difficult than preventing that problem in the first place, or solving it while it was smaller. Now much time and energy has to be spent cleaning up the mess and restoring the status quo. For another thing, in the midst of a problem, people are never going to be at their best. The situation is urgent and people are stressed, frustrated, and in a hurry. Indeed, there are plenty of managers who don’t really deal with problems until they get angry. And, of course, sometimes these conversations become heated.

On top of all that, employees often feel attacked when they are confronted with a negative assessment of their behavior. These conversations often come as a shock, as if without warning, especially when the performance in question is a problem that has been festering for some time. The employee is likely to say or at least think, “I’ve been doing this same thing for days, weeks, or months, so why now all of a sudden are you coming down on me? Why didn’t you talk to me about this problem sooner, before I built a track record of failure?” Often the manager starts to second-guess himself: “Do I have all the facts? Did I spell out expectations clearly? Am I being fair?” And the answers are probably no, no, and no. Plus, neither the manager nor the employee is experienced at having conversations with each other about the employee’s performance, so neither the employee nor the manager is very good at it. Of course, these conversations are going to be difficult. Most performance improvement conversations are doomed before they even start.

These conversations are often followed by hours of fixing, salvaging, and cleaning up to get things back on track. This is often what managers mean when they say they spend all their management time “fighting fires, solving problems” and thus get behind on their “real” work. After solving a performance problem that never had to become so urgent in the first place, the typical manager convinces himself that he definitely doesn’t have any more time to do any more managing. The manager goes right back to his hands-off undermanaging ways, awaiting the next unnecessary crisis, when he will spring into action once again.

Meanwhile, the employee is likely to feel demoralized. There are bad feelings. Sometimes it can be hard to bounce back and start feeling good about the job and the manager again. Often things get back to normal. But sometimes, especially after a very difficult confrontation between a manager and an employee, the situation goes downhill. The employee might even go into a downward spiral.

Do you want to be great at solving employee performance problems? Do you want to find it downright easy to tell employees when and how they need to improve? If you do, you need to anticipate and avoid one problem after another—and solve small problems whenever they crop up. If you engage in regular problem solving, nine out of ten performance problems will be solved quickly and easily or will be avoided altogether. In most cases, even long-standing problems will die away under the withering medicine of regular and consistent strong management.


About Bruce Tulgan
Bruce Tulgan is an adviser to business leaders all over the world and a sought after speaker and seminar leader. He is the founder of Rainmaker Thinking, Inc., a management training firm. Bruce is the author of the classic Managing Generation X as well as It's OK to Be the Boss and Winning the Talent Wars. He has written for The New York Times, USA Today, Harvard Business Review and numerous other newspapers, magazines, professional journals, on-line sources and academic publications.

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