FAQ Series: How to Correct Your Team When You Have Been Too Lenient

One common mistake that new leaders make is to be too lenient and “cut people some slack” on performance issues. If you have slipped up in this area of leadership, it’s okay. Many people before you have made the same mistake, and it is recoverable.

A common sign that you have made this error is surprise and/or shock expressed by your team members when you speak with them about some element of poor or unsatisfactory performance. Your first step towards fixing this issue is to recognize it. Your next step is to immediately take action to correct it.

You can get a more complete action plan for resolving this problem from two teleseminars I held previously titled Coach Your Way to Leadership Success and Accountability Conversations. Here are three steps you can take to begin turning the situation around…

Accept responsibility for the miscommunication.

One key principle of remarkable leadership is that you cannot reasonably hold people accountable or expect them to take responsibility for issues that you failed to make clear in the past. This includes both performance issues that you failed to identify and performance issues that you have “let slide.”

In both cases, the ultimate responsibility for the performance shortfall rests with the leader.

If we expect other people to take responsibility for and act to correct their mistakes and failures, then we must be willing to do the same. The important point here is that you are accepting responsibility for the failure to communicate the expectation or to identify the performance gap; you are not exempting them from participating in the process of finding a solution to the problem.

Identify the gap in performance.

Your next step is to tell them the gap in performance as you see it. In most cases, it is also useful to ask them for their understanding of the gap. Some of the questions you want to answer at this stage of the conversation are…

• What went wrong?
• Why is it wrong?
• How did it go wrong?
• What resources or communications were missing?

The idea here is to have a discussion about the gap between current performance and expected performance. Keep the conversation focused on the specific, observable, and, if possible, measurable gap between the current state and the desired future state rather than on perceptions and intentions.

As much as you possibly can, keep this conversation directed toward clarifying the desired future state rather than exploring the past. The better you accomplish this goal, the less likely the person will be to get defensive during the conversation.

Ask them to help you find ways to close the gap.

After you have clearly identified the performance gap, its likely causes, and what you would prefer to see in the future, ask your team member how they think the gap can be closed. You want to engage them in the process of answering these questions…

• What actions do they need to take?
• How are those actions different from past actions?
• What resources, time, or help do they need?
• What, exactly, does success look like?
• How will you both know that you have achieved it?
• When will you meet again to discuss progress towards the goal?

When you engage your team member in solving the problem, you reduce the risk of the conversation feeling like a reprimand and you increase the probability that they will take action to address the performance gap.

The goal of this conversation is to strike a balance between overly lenient and overly harsh. You want to have a conversation directed towards resolving an identified performance gap and not directed towards placing blame. If you start by accepting your role in failing to communicate or to require meeting an expectation in the past, you will probably “take the sting” out of the conversation. When you take out the sting, you can move in the direction of problem solving and collaboration in a way that engages your team member rather than alienating them.