How to talk to an underperforming employee who doesn't see it

Most advice on how to talk to an underperforming employee assumes the employee already knows. Often they don't. The hardest version of this conversation is with someone who thinks they are doing fine, said so at their last review, and is about to hear otherwise from a manager who has been putting it off for a month.

It is one of the conversations managers bring to the Management Lab, where it gets played, stopped at the first line that goes wrong, and run again. What follows is a made-up example of how that tends to go. Priya and Callum are invented, and so is the firm.

The underperforming employee who thinks things are fine

Priya runs a team of eight at a mid-sized firm. Callum has been on the team for two years. He is well liked, he is reliable about hours, and for the last four months his work has needed more from other people than it should. Two colleagues have started checking it before it goes out, without telling him. At his review in the spring he rated himself as strong, and Priya, who had a lot on and did not want to start something, let it stand.

Now a client has noticed. Priya has booked half an hour with Callum on Thursday. She knows roughly what she wants to say, and she has not said any of it out loud.

The first line, and what it does to the conversation

Priya opens the way most managers open, because it feels kind.

"So, I just wanted to check in. How do you think things have been going?"

She already knows the answer, and Callum gives it. Things are fine. Busy, but fine. He has been across everything, and he mentions two pieces of work he is pleased with.

Priya now has to contradict him. Whatever she says next arrives as a correction to something he offered in good faith, and he will hear it as a trap: she asked, he answered honestly, and now she is telling him he was wrong. From here the conversation is about whether his answer was reasonable, and the work, which is the reason she is in the room, has not come up yet.

I would stop the scene there. The opening line decided what the meeting was about, and Priya handed that decision to Callum with a question that sounded gentle.

The line that replaces it

Run it again from the top. This time Priya says what the meeting is for before she asks anything.

"I've asked you in because I've noticed something in the work over the last few months and I want to talk it through with you. In the last four weeks, three pieces went out after somebody else had reworked them. I'd like to understand what's happening from your side."

It is longer and it is harder to say. Callum now knows what the meeting is about before he has committed to a position, so he is not being asked to grade himself and then marked down. He has been given something specific, three pieces in four weeks, which he can dispute if he wants to, but he would be disputing a fact rather than Priya's opinion of him. The question at the end is a real one as well. Priya does not know why the work has slipped and the line admits it, so Callum has something useful to answer.

He may still say "that's not fair". He probably will. Priya is now answering that from inside a conversation about the work, rather than from inside an argument about whether her first question was honest.

What the swap shows

Then the pair change sides. The manager who played Priya now plays Callum and has the opening question put to them.

From Priya's chair "how do you think it's going" felt gentle. From Callum's it feels like being walked into something, because no answer ends well. Say fine and you are about to be contradicted. Say not great and you have just confessed to a problem you did not know existed. Most managers have been asked that question by their own boss at some point, and playing Callum reminds them what they thought of it.

The specific version is uncomfortable to hear too. Three pieces in four weeks is not a nice thing to be told, but it is something you can answer, and from Callum's side that matters more than how it felt in the first few seconds.

Feedback in the Lab is about what a line did to the conversation, and by this point the manager who said the first line has heard the answer from the other side, which is more than I could tell them from the front of the room.

Where this gets practised

Most managers reading this will recognise the first line, possibly as their own. Recognising it and saying the second version out loud to somebody who pushes back are two different things, and the second needs a first go somewhere it does not count.

The Lab gives managers that go. I write the scenarios from what you tell me on the pre-call, with the names and details changed, and on the day the group picks one scenario of its own. It runs for three hours with up to sixteen managers, and the launch price on the rate card is £750.