A Little More Conversation

The Issue

A large government line department was challenged by their performance management process. The supervisors and managers were supposed to respond to performance issues with their direct staff and were also supposed to be conducting annual performance reviews, but neither was happening consistently or successfully.

The Methodology

What we know from our experience is that supervisors and managers need to have both the competence and the confidence to have conversations with employees about how they are doing at work or how they are behaving at work, or it won’t happen. These conversations can be tough, and so there is a natural tendency to defer them for as long as possible. In response to this department’s challenge, we built a learning series that started at the very beginning with how to communicate your expectations, and ended with the challenging issue of how to influence the engagement of your staff. Each session was interactive and skill based, with practice incorporated and homework for the next session to help reinforce the learning.

The Solution

The engagement level of participants in the series was something that the department had not experienced before. Supervisors and managers were sharing that they were having conversations around unmet expectations that they should have had years ago, and did not feel that they could. Participants shared in their feedback that this learning series was practical, that it addressed the challenges that they face in their daily work and that it helped them to have the conversations that they needed to have at work.

HOW WE HELPED: