Everyone makes mistakes. Is there a better way to provide feedback to defensive employees? Elaine Varelas discusses feedback models
Receiving feedback is necessary for an employee who makes mistakes, and everyone makes mistakes, but what if they make providing feedback difficult with defensive behavior? Elaine Varelas discusses finding the source of their mistakes, how to approach a conversation, and the importance of feedback models.
Q: I have an employee who regularly makes mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes, but he gets defensive and combative when I approach him about it. He works hard, but his attitude makes it difficult to provide feedback. How do I talk to an employee who won’t listen?A:
Combative is unacceptable at work. Defensive is difficult enough to deal with, but combative is not something that should be tolerated. Combative means write-ups for inappropriate behavior at the office. If it leads to physical behaviors, it could lead to separation from the organization. No form of physical or verbal violence should ever be allowed, so if combative means slamming the table instead of personal violence, it’s still violence
I’m glad to hear he works hard, but part of working hard is being able to accept feedback. It’s important to identify why he is making mistakes, and if they are different mistakes or the same one multiple times. People often make mistakes when they have not been trained correctly, or their training was incomplete. People make mistakes when they are overworked, or stressed, or if they are interrupted many times while trying to complete their work. Identifying the “why” of these mistakes is vital to moving into corrective mode for both the job and the behavior. Can you identify if other things may be impacting his work? Are there personal issues – health, family, financial – that he’s trying to deal with? Learning more about the cause of these errors and not just the errors themselves might lead to a resolution.
Employees resistant to feedback have the greatest difficulty taking feedback “in the moment.” You need to arrange a private conversation, letting him know in advance you’d like to talk about how to help him do the job you know he’s capable of doing. Do not surprise this person. Let him know that he is an important employee to you, his work is valuable, and you want to ensure his success. Identify what the causes of the errors may be, and you or the organization’s potential contributions to that. “I am concerned that we may not have on-boarded you well, or offered a complete training on the way the job needs to be done. Perhaps there is some training we can do together, or I can have (name) work with you. If you get agreement, you can move on. To work together well, I’ll be commenting on your work, and letting you know what works well and what needs improvement. This hasn’t gone well for us, and I’d like to see how we can ensure you are able to learn from my experience without becoming angry or defensive.” Help him identify what defensive behavior looks like and understand that one of the most important behaviors successful people have is a willingness and ability to accept feedback – and that feedback is not always negative. You can provide some positive examples of feedback you’ve given him. Also work on your own skills for providing feedback. Are you good at it? Do you make it easy to accept feedback? Often it’s the delivery that makes the deliverance. One model that many organizations use and that we believe in the GROW model:
Goals
Reality
Options, and alternative courses of action
What will you do?
This model engages the employee in a conversation where you ask them questions about their goals and what’s currently happening. What’s the reality? What options have you considered? And what will you do that makes the most sense to you at this time? Engaging an employee in problem solving provides feedback that won’t be perceived as negatively as some other methods. Some organizations use the feedback sandwich: Good feedback, challenging feedback, good feedback. Figure out what works best for your employee. Because he’s defensive, an interactive feedback process like GROW may have a better chance of succeeding.
There are often times managers have to make difficult decisions. If this is an ability issue and that’s where the mistakes are coming from, your feedback won’t solve the problem. But those considerations should come after assessing why the mistakes are made in the first place and trying resolve that situation.
