Poor performance is a fact of life, and it happens for a variety of reasons. There are frequent questions about it on any staff engagement and it forms a core part of the annual Civil Service People Survey. Most of the advice here works whether you are a line manager or you are the person that has been alleged to have poor performance. It’s worth noting that if you perceive someone else as a poor performer and you can’t see anyone doing anything about it that doesn’t mean that they are a poor performer or that nothing is being done. Tackled well only the person and their manager would know about it.
Steps to Improve Poor Performance
Keep copious notes. Regardless of which side you are on, the process works best when there’s a clear audit trail of what happened, who knew what when, what was asked for, what was agreed, and the expectations that were set. You should go into the process with the declared intent of improving performance in response to feedback to the expected standard, and make sure you’ve documented that. Done well this is a two-way street, no-one is perfect, and even with the best of intentions mis-communications happen. There are also times when people end up in the wrong job, recruitment processes are far from perfect, and that’s usually the fault of the hiring manager, not the person they hired (blatant lying and fraud aside).
As a manager dealing with subordinate managers that aren’t performing you need
- evidence of having set expectations (you can only show performance is poor if it’s against a performance standard). Often the department or directorate will have done this for you, so you just need a record that you’ve directly discussed with your direct team.
- evidence of poor behaviours, which can be hard to get if you didn’t see them yourself. So you need to get people who complain to write it down. You also need to create conditions where the entire team feel safe telling you about their concerns. This is really hard, so you need to be there amongst them and be human. I make a point of 1:1s at least every couple of months with the people I countersign to have the space to check how they’re doing, and if there’s support they need.
- copious notes of any meetings you have to discuss poor performance. I always scripted these in advance so that I could share the note with the person almost as soon as the meeting was over. That way they had a record of what was alleged. I added their side of the situation and what we agreed to avoid allegations of poor performance in future. This last is important, because when you deal with e.g. G7s they’re very likely to have a plausible story that contradicts your ‘evidence’. Also folk have bad days, and while regrettable they aren’t a reason to take poor performance action. So you need to show patterns of behaviour, which is easy with e.g. caseworkers, but really difficult with higher managers and policy folk. So while you might accept their explanation for each instance, there’s a development need to prevent recurrence which they should acknowledge. People are reticent about complaining, so the fact there were allegations to the line manager tells you that the relationships aren’t strong enough for them to deal with it directly. That itself is a poor performance issue.
- to stay human and friendly. The purpose is about helping people to improve, not beating them up for failure.
One of the things you need to do in all this is to protect yourself. Possibly the most important thing. So speak to your line manager before you start. Get their advice. Also speak to the HR business partner, and bounce all your draft notes off them before you share them with the person in question. HR will make sure that you are being scrupulously fair and following the proper procedures. Read the guidance yourself, don’t rely on other people’s interpretations. Ask questions and make sure you understand the answers. Document all of this too, as much as the interactions with your team member. If for any reason there is a formal complaint then showing why you made the choices you did is important.