When Employee Coaching Is too Late

We talk a lot about coaching best practices on this blog, and how important it is to make it an ongoing priority. I read a great post on this topic last week by Annabel Kaye on her Koffeeklatch blog on HR Zone, When Does Performance Management Become Bullying? It essentially describes what happens when coaching comes too late, in the form of a performance improvement plan.

Kaye explains how the process of “performance managing” underperforming staff walks a fine line that can be very costly if it results in an employee being terminated.

Now more than ever underperforming staff are more likely to be ‘performance managed’ out of the business. Poor practice and a few rogue players are giving performance management a bad name, so that in some organisations announcing that an individual needs to participate in a performance improvement programme is tantamount to handing them their notice! The setting of impossible goals (by over stating the goals or under resourcing what is needed to achieve them) is one of the behaviors identified as bullying. Not only will unrealistic goals undermine the fairness of any dismissal but they may also trigger claims of bullying. If these claims are linked to any issue of discrimination this can turn into a very expensive ‘efficiency exercise’.

Kaye makes a valid argument about how poor coaching or management leading up to a performance improvement plan can quickly become a big problem. When coaching is not an ingrained part of the organization’s culture or is not backed up with performance management on a day-to-day basis a performance improvement plan comes out of left field. Too often it is easy to ignore an underperforming or problem employee until it is utterly and completely unworkable, and then the reaction is to try to coach them out of it and “fix” them. At that point it is very likely too late as the script with that employee is going to be set, and that individual is not likely going to react well to being managed in this manner. You are giving them a plan when it may already be too late.

As Kaye sums up:
Real performance management does not start at ‘poor performance’ but is there all the time. Employment law is a very expensive bolt on when management has failed. It tends to work better as a tool of effective management, rather than a substitute for one.

Creating a culture centered on performance management and coaching as a day-to-day priority can go a long way towards avoiding perceived performance management bullying.