Page 89 - DMGT517_PERFORMANCE_MANAGEMENT_SYSTEM

Performance Management System

Notes Performance-related conversations may focus on:

1. What the person is doing-‘what exactly did you do?’, ‘how are you going about this?’
2. Comparisons-‘is this different from what you did last time?’, are other people doing the
same thing?’, ‘can you learn from them?’
3. Questions about thinking-‘how are you thinking this through?’, ‘what evidence are you
looking for?’, ‘what assumptions are you making?’, ‘do they need checking?’
4. Questions about resources-‘what it help to organize your resources differently?’
Managers as coaches face a number of common pitfalls in their conversations, for any of the
following reasons:
1. Having moved into coaching before establishing a certain amount of rapport and trust;
2. Being unclear in their own minds about what they are trying to achieve by engaging in the
conversation;
3. Not listening properly because they are too busy deciding whether what they are saying is
right or not;
4. Only using questions which demonstrate their knowledge;

5. Avoiding questions to which they don’t know the answer;
6. Answering their own questions;
7. Not picking up signals as the conversation goes along about how useful it is for the other
person.
These pitfalls can be avoided by keeping in mind the purpose and desired outcome of the
coaching activity.

8.2.2 Coaching to Improve Unsatisfactory Performance

A further and more skillful area of coaching is in the area of challenging or confronting for
performance improvement. When a person is not delivering the performance required, he/she
may have a variety of emotional reactions such as despair, resistance, self-justifi cation, or even
complete unawareness.
The coaching approach in this situation is to deal with these by focusing on clear expectations.
Often these expectations have not been properly mapped out or clearly understood.

Gathering information and agreeing where the problem lies are essential next steps, at the same
time as staying aware of the other person’s reactions.
In dealing with underperformance, the following pattern, for a coach, can be useful:
1. Get clear in your own mind what the situation is: what is the current performance, and
what it is expected to be;
2. Lay aside feelings of blame and irritation and gather information about how individuals are
reacting, their awareness of the performance shortfall, and what they see as the problems.
3. Get the person being coached to share in identifying the problems, adding their own
perspective and ask them for possibilities to resolve them. This is a stage where it is
particularly important to maintain a positive and clear relationship, focusing forward on
next steps and change.
4. Establish a process whereby the employee will set up a plan for informing the coach/
manager of progress against clearly stated goals.

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