The opposite of the gift-giving model we had been looking at would be to see what the results consist of when one performs worse than their peers and the process of fixing that. I have been in many team settings and have seen people experience consequences for lower performance levels and have also been on the other side of it as a leader and have had to handle giving discipline. This post will allow me to draw on my experiences and focus in on a situation where someone was penalized or disciplined by a supervisor and how each party handled it and grew from it. This post allows us to think beyond what we learned from the articles in the last post and put ourselves in those situations.
My most prominent experience of seeing a team member being disciplined is though my professional consulting RSO. CUBE is an organization I have brought up a lot in my posts due to how much relevance it has to the things we write our posts about and learn about. CUBE has a very strict policy in terms of the quality of work each consultant provides and has measures set in place for when that criteria is not met. I have seen these measures of discipline taken multiple times in my two years in CUBE. One specific incident was during my first semester as project manager.
As I mentioned, we are a consulting organization that works with local startups and consult them with business and technology problems over the course of a semester. We are usually in groups of four or five and when that semester, I had three consultants on my team. This meant that each consultant had to put in a decent amount of time and work to make sure we got the results that we wanted. The expectations that I had for each consultant were already higher than normal at the beginning of the semester. The way we discipline members of the organization in general is to have the project manager talk to them as a warning and then have the executive board reach out to them if their performance doesn't get better. I had one consultant that first semester as PM and he was really struggling to communicate well with me and complete the deliverables I had assigned. I wanted to focus on the relationship aspect of my team as well as his relationship with the executive board so I was very subtle in addressing room for improvement. After a couple weeks of the same level of performance and especially when comparing that to the high performance levels of the other team members, I spoke to an executive member for them to take disciplinary measure. They also wanted to make sure they could maintain a positive relationship with this team member so they told them that they would want to see improvement within a week or two. I think giving people a chance to show change in their performance is always a good way to show discipline but also maintain a good relationship between the supervisor and team members.
Although I was not the one to take disciplinary actions, if I was on the executive board and had to speak to the team member directly, I would have handled it very similarly. I would have given them another chance to change especially being of a higher authority, would hope they would take more serious actions to change their work ethic. I would hope that they would react in a positive way and an apologetic way in order to improve their performance overall.
I think this story would have benefitted from some more background to understand the situation better. Had the consultant in question been doing consulting before you became project manager? And what about the other members of your group? Did they know each other in advance or were they new to each other?
ReplyDeleteIn other words, was this consultant just learning the job or had he been doing the job already and now was underperforming. You mentioned this was a communications issue. There are some students (including in our class) who struggle to communicate, both in writing and face-to-face, while other students are quite glib. If your poor performing consultant was simply uncomfortable communicating, then is discipline the right way to go about things.
I also don't have a sense of how much of the communication is email or texting versus talking with one another. Nor whether the person being disciplines had English as a first language or not. These factors matter in telling the story.
It is good your RSO has a process for managing poor performance, but sometimes it is important to spend more time focusing on the causes of the situation then working on the solution. If you have a firm hold on the causes, then the solution might suggest itself. Otherwise, you can be solving the wrong problem.