The Situation:
Giving constructive feedback
Adam is a new senior manager of a Fortune 100 company. His responsibility is to make some significant changes to the non-performing team he is now responsible for. The team has 8 members plus the team leader. They are diligent and working hard but are not producing results and get very defensive when questioned.
The Solution:
Action Plan
In working with Adam, the first important steps were to halt the blame game and stop asking what happened in the past. Instead, work forward, agree on the solution and decide how to prevent any issues from reoccurring. This took practice.
Adam began role-playing the dialog with me so that we could grasp the voice tone, word choices and get Adam using active listening to fully comprehend what a person says. This was videotaped each time. He began to see the difference in approach which led him to avoid the blame game.
The Outcome:
The interactions have been positive with the majority of the team members. Each member has taken a role on how to drive the team to results instead of saying, this is how it has always been. This was very helpful in getting the team to adopt more effective strategies to help achieve their organizational goals.
They achieved their first goal rather quickly (with Adam also realizing that one of the team members may need to be moved to another department and even possibly let go). The Senior team is quite happy with the results. They also realized they must grant Adam the authority to let go of the non-performing team member. Adam is now in the process of hiring a new manager for the team.
The smile is the prettiest thing you can wear. Author unknown.