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Coaching Careless Staff

Guest post by: Juliette Robertson

Article Overview: Managing careless staff can be very frustrating for both the manager and the team particularly if the staff member appears not to care about how their performance is affecting others. Here is how you can use a coaching approach to get staff to focus on fixing the problem themselves.

Coaching Careless Staff

For managers, the key really is to get yourself into a resourceful state and to bring yourself back to focusing on the outcome. There are ways that you can do that. You want to change your state from feeling frustrated and annoyed to getting yourself into calm and centered resourceful state.

Maybe you need to go outside and take a deep breath and have a little walk around, make yourself a cup of tea, have a drink of water, whatever it might be just to calm yourself down.

Then start asking yourself some empowering questions like, "What's the ideal outcome here? What is it that we really want to achieve?" What is driving this behaviour?

You might perceive carelessness to also include laziness or stupidity but the role of an effective manager/coach in the situation is to empower that person to see that they are letting themselves down so that they want to pick themselves up and learn from their mistakes and minimize the risks going forward and do a great job.

It's not about labeling someone as careless. All managers should be quite hesitant to label a behavior in that way, because it's not addressing the specific incident that's occurred. It's labeling, which can be quite dangerous.

Its important to make sure that once you've managed your state, that you've moved to a private space to have a conversation with a staff member.

The last thing you want to do is humiliate them in front of their peers when they've made an error. That's only going to make them feel more stressed and make more errors and perform poorly so it's the last thing you want to do.

Some great one liners you can use to open the conversation include:

Coach: I noticed that there was a problem with the Widget project. You're usually on top of this stuff, so I just want to make sure that everything is okay. How are you? Is everything okay? (NB: Incidence of errors is highly correlated with stress. Listen for underlying causes that may need to be addressed.)

Coach: Hmmm... Well, we want you to be feeling and performing at your best. Is that important to you too?

Coach:Do you have any ideas on how you might be able to resolve this Widget problem? Is there any way that I/we can support you to resolve this? (NB: Encourage staff to share her ideas. Make notes of their suggestions)

Ensure you are focusing on the processand not blame the person's character or personality and you will be far more successful at getting them to come up with the solution for themselves.

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Article Tags: careless staff, coaching, empowering questions



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