How to Communicate When Something's Been Done Badly

When you are in a leadership role, you will understandably hope that everything always goes well.

You will also probably hope that everyone working with you performs to their full capabilities and does everything necessary to support whatever the particular enterprise is.

However, what do you do when that isn't the case?

For most people who find themselves in a leadership position, this can be something of a nightmare. It is one of the biggest challenges when coaching leadership because so much depends upon both an individual set of circumstances and personal judgment.

However, here there are a few basic tips that may prove useful if you find yourself facing such a situation:

1. Make sure that you understand all the facts. Is sometimes easy, when facing disappointment, to subconsciously move into identifying someone you wish to blame. That can be disastrous if you happen to get it wrong and attribute responsibility to someone who, in fact, had little or nothing to do with it. So, make sure you understand all of the facts involved and once you are sure that it appears to be a performance-related issue, get someone independent to verify your conclusions before doing anything else.

2. Concentrate on solving the problem as your top priority. Inspirational leadership is about the showing you understand what is important and fixing the problem should be considerably more important than trying to understand how it happened and who is accountable.

3. Be certain that you understand the difference between a genuine mistake that can happen as a result of an error of judgement and poor performance which is perhaps typically attributed to questionable attitudes or shaky work ethic etc. Your tactics for dealing with the two should be significantly different.

4. Be clear whether a lack of training or required skills was an issue. If it is, do not hold the individual accountable but do something to bring them up to the required levels of ability.

5. If the issue is to do with a genuine mistake or a lack of the required skills, your approach to the individual should be consultative and advisory with the emphasis on helping them to learn. Do not under any circumstances enter into the allocation of blame or recriminations and retribution.

6. Almost inevitably as a leader, you will sooner or later have to face an individual who has a negative mindset or who lacks a commitment to the objectives in hand. See this as a mutual challenge for both of you to address and again do not be tempted to slip into angry confrontation, lecturing or handing out threats. These approaches are virtually never productive.

7. If you are dealing with such an individual, it's necessary to work with them calmly to try to understand what the drivers are behind their errors of approach or commitment. In the vast majority of such cases, the individual is not irredeemable and it is simply a question of putting in place, where humanly possible, training programmes or development aids to address the causes of their attitudes.

8. Finally, where you are trying to deal with such a case, never hide the truth or your perceptions from the individual concerned. This is neither in your interest nor theirs because they are unlikely to be able to deal with their performance issues unless someone has calmly discussed the matter with them and encouraged them to both recognise the problem and to do something about it.

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