Humanize Your Communication: Part 2 of High Performance Teams

Humanize your communication allows leaders and team members to successfully engage in difficult but essential conversations. The key to successful communication is to have difficult conversations but to do so with both empathy and conviction. However, this is not always as easy as it sounds and many leaders have difficulty delivering hard-to-hear feedback—either they avoid it all together or they deliver it in a way that is unhelpful or discouraging for their employee, co-worker or client.

Let’s start with the former. If a leader fails to have important conversations with their employees about poor behavior, attitude and/or performance, a leader is ultimately indirectly telling that person (and the entire office) that what is happening is fine and acceptable. A leader must confront these unacceptable behaviours in order to correct them. As the saying goes, “You don’t get what you demand, you get what you tolerate.” 

So how do we solve it? One change that you can perform right away is making room for and having more of these difficult conversations when needed— as The Last Lecture author Randy Pausch says, “when there is an elephant in the room, introduce it”. We all know when we need to address something that’s been going on, either performance-based or behaviour-based but setting up a schedule to have these conversations is a good method to make sure they actually happen.  

You can start by simply scheduling in the space for things like performance reviews and quarterly team meetings. The timing and duration for these types of encounters will differ based upon your organization structure, but it is important to make sure that once implemented they are constant and consistent. In addition, it is best to prepare your employees for what to expect, what kinds of things you will be addressed and if they can expect a 1-on-1 or a team setting. Setting expectations and structure allows employees to both come prepared and also to enter the meeting with a positive attitude. Mystery meetings lead to unprepared employees, which wastes everyone’s time, and or nervous employees who don’t know what they are walking into. This can be the difference between an honest and productive conversation and one that is defensive and stagnant.

But why does it matter if it’s just one employee? More often than not this one obvious negative employee might be affecting their colleagues more than you think—you should never underestimate the ability of one team member to derail an entire team. If you have a particularly poor performer that has a bad attitude or demonstrates poor behaviour you may start to see a feeling of apathy wash over the entire office or department. If the negative behaviour or attitude continues to go unaddressed by leadership, sooner or later, it will begin to permeate the office environment, ultimately lowering the standards for other employees. This is when employees start to throw their hands up and say “This person isn’t working hard!” or “This person is a jerk!” If there are no repercussions or active change by leadership with this behaviour then your stronger employees will begin to wonder why they are working hard, displaying good communication skills, and going the extra mile if it is not required of everyone to do so. This can typically be viewed as selfish or lazy, but in fact it’s a very common human response. All of us, eventually, will be impacted by an unproductive or negative working environment. 

Although it is important to check in with all your employees, not just the ones who complain the loudest, these employees who are more sensitive to environmental shifts in the office may act as your first red flags that something is amiss, especially if the team is in the process of a new project or transition. Receiving this flag may prompt you to start inquiring with other employees to try to find out the deeper root of a problem before it gets out of hand.

That being said, in any meeting, a leader should be conscious of balancing humility and empathy with conviction throughout the conversation. While addressing the gaps with your employees and team are essential components to any performance review, making room to also recognize people’s contributions, such as highlighting things that may have gone unnoticed by other team members is also important. In order to have successful interactions, your employees should come out of these conversations feeling hopeful, driven, and inspired. If a meeting focuses too much on failures and shortcomings your employees will begin to dread these conversations and will not come out with the motivation they need to sustain a positive behavioural change. As a leader if you fail to demonstrate a good attitude in your meeting, expect that the same attitude will soon be modelled by your employees.

It is also important to keep in mind that certain members of your team may be impacted more by some factors than others (which means some people will become negative, less engaged, unmotivated or start complaining sooner than others). This does not mean however that they are lazy, negative, or discontents, but more likely that they may require different approaches than others. Take the time to understand your employees’ struggles and needs. While some employees prefer open praise, others might wish to receive it privately, the same goes for negative feedback. 

Delivering feedback in a way that is geared towards growth and development is a learnable and important skill for any leader in your company. If an employee is given unproductive or continuous negative feedback it will start to affect their confidence. If your employees don’t feel valued, encouraged, and supported it will reflect in their performance.  To avoid this, when delivering feedback it is essential that it is future-oriented instead of past-oriented. This means staying away from words like haven’t, didn’t, weren’t and hasn’t, and instead focusing on words like have, do, are and will. This may seem like a small change, but it’s actually part of our deeply embedded human instinct; future-oriented feedback signals to us that we belong to an ideal future. This has nothing to do with being positive or negative—it’s about offering feedback that accelerates learning development. 

Think about it this way: If you were on a roadtrip, got a little lost, and stopped to ask for directions, and all the person offered you was a list of the wrong turns you made, and not the steps forward to your destination…. you’d still be sitting on the side of the road not knowing how to get to where want to go. When we only discuss mistakes that have been made, we’re only focusing on wrong turns, rather than giving people a roadmap to their destination.

See the difference? This distinction may seem simple, but this small change can mean big success in building a high performance team. This is because future-oriented feedback can signal empathy, safety, and belonging. Empathy allows for you as a leader to help better understand your employees and find an appropriate solution to the problem. Providing a feeling of safety on the other hand, allows your employee to feel, well, safe during these tough conversations. In letting them know that you’re delivering this feedback from a place of progress rather than a place of criticism allows for a more open and honest conversation. This type of reaction towards a problem strengthens an employees performance rather than hindering it, which is often the result of conversations based on fear and rejection. This is because typically our employees aren’t performing poorly on purpose. Rather, their performance is often a reflection of their environment, sometimes this is inside the office but also at times factors that take place outside of it. In each of these cases, you as a leader are able to have a conversation to find ways to make changes that can aid this employee in having their needs met, which will allow them to be more successful at work.

Are they behind on their numbers because the employee they are assigned to collaborate with is proving hard to work with? Are they continuously tardy for a 9am meeting because the daycare they use for their kids only opens at 8:30am? In these cases a leader can potentially make changes to create a better environment. Are you able to have a conversation with this other team member and find out where their bad attitude might be coming from? Are you able to move the 9am meeting to 9:15am to accommodate your employee’s scheduling conflicts? It is also possible during these conversations that you might need to be honest with your employee that this might not be the right work environment for them but whatever the outcome, these conversations are essential for coming up with proactive solutions and ultimately a better performing team.