Do people really want to do a bad job?

No, I don't think so. I think it is your job to help them to do it well.

The Rolls Royce Approach

Did you know that Rolls Royce actually track the performance of their engines in the air? They have sensors that send them information and it's beamed through to Derby where engineers are alerted to anything unusual.

If there's a problem, they contact you (if you own a plane) and send an engineer out if necessary - before there are any major issues.

Building on Feedback

Last week we talked about feedback and how important it is. This is a great example of using it effectively.

It's what all managers should be doing: keeping track in case there is a problem. But what do you do when there is a problem?

A manager is responsible for motivating and leading their team - and also for tackling performance issues. But many managers don't. I think that's because they just don't know how.

Serious Problem

One company director once said that all her "department heads were excellent". But there were people further down in the department who were not achieving. They were in customer-facing roles and were getting complaints from customer and were not reaching anything like their sales targets.

So how could all her department heads be so good if these issues were not being dealt with?
When I asked her what her plan was to deal with these performance issues, she said she would have some meetings about it.

I asked her what she thought those on the front line needed to do differently in order to achieve their targets. She didn't have any thoughts at all. She didn't know what the problems were or how they needed to be tackled. I asked her what she thought their team leaders and managers needed to do. She thought they needed to have more meetings.

In reality she had no idea at all what to do. That's why the problems had been going on for years.
She'd been in the job for eight years. In my view, that means there was no excuse.

You are no doubt wondering why she was still in the job.

This is the core problem with performance issues. If they are not being tackled, that means the manager is not doing their job.

You wouldn't want to fly in a plane where the engines were rattling and had been for eight years, would you?

The very sad thing is that it's often the person at the bottom who is blamed for this, when in fact, if he or she was just given a little help and shown what to do differently, in most instances, the problem would be solved very quickly.

olls Royce produce all kinds of graphs and charts so they can tell if anything is even slightly off balance.

Then they take immediate action to get it back in tune again. This is what managers need to do - especially in this very difficult time that we all face at the moment.

Once you have identified what you are dealing with, you then need to work out how you are going to deal with it. That includes what you are going to say and how you are going to say it.

The Good News

If you tackle things early most problems can be averted and little or no damage is done.

How Do You Do That?

• Have very clear objectives
• Have clear standards of behaviour
• Make sure you are getting the information you need to keep an eye on progress.

Talk to people if it looks as though there is a problem. In my experience these things can almost always be sorted out easily when they are tackled early. The way to do that is to assume the best of the individual. Just make the same assumptions about them as you'd like them to make if the situation was reversed.

until next week.......