As a manager, it is your responsibility and role within your company and team to ensure that everyone is doing their job diligently and to the best of their abilities. When things are running smoothly, it is easy to keep morale high through praise and positive feedback. This type of news is always easy to deliver and welcomed by all employees.
However, as anyone in a leadership position can attest, delivering criticism or negative feedback to someone who is underperforming or not working towards the goal of the team creates a touchy and uncomfortable situation. Because of this, many leaders tend to delay or avoid providing critical input.
Although tough conversations are difficult, they are necessary to achieve a company’s or team goals. Furthermore, one quickly learns that bringing issues to light and working through them in a timely and constructive manner is often times far less confrontational than originally feared. With this in mind, a philosophy effective leaders should take to heart is, “Good news should travel fast, but bad news should travel faster.”
I recently read an insightful article about this subject by Stephen Lynch on Results.com which highlights why it’s important to deal with poor performance right away and provides four key practices leaders can use when giving (and receiving) feedback. Read the whole article here.