The challenge in these conversations is to (1) keep your cool, (2) listen for how the employee avoids, blames others, or denies any performance shortfall, and (3) respond assertively so that you move the “monkey” of accountability over to the employee, where it belongs. The way some employees deflect responsibility can raise your ire in a heartbeat. You can easily get tangled up in their masterful manipulation which some have honed over the years with past bosses who failed to get them to do what they are paid to do.

The solution is to do dry runs of the conversation. In other words, practice.

When it comes up in a workshop I often ask the manager to engage with me in a short role play of the interaction in front of the class. He/she plays the difficult employee as realistically as possible (and they usually do a very convincing job of it). I play him/her, the manager, and we enact a typical or real situation. Then, with the help of the observing class, we analyze how successful I was avoiding the employee’s “hooks” and getting him/her to take adult accountability for the job performance in question. We may then replay the scenario with the manager playing himself/herself and me becoming the employee. Training participants and certainly the managers in the role plays frequently report that these magic moments were the high point of learning for them from the entire course.

You can do this at work. Ask a trusted peer manager or perhaps your boss to help you out. Have them play the employee and give the interaction a couple of dry runs. If the employee (actor) succeeds in turning the responsibility or blame back on you, analyze what you said (or didn’t say) that allowed this to happen. Make corrections and role play it again. Consider recording the practice rounds in audio or video to help you get a clearer picture of how you are approaching it.

One neat by-product of this methodology is that when you take on the persona of your difficult employee in a role play, you actually get a feeling of what it is like for him or her when interacting with you. It takes you to a new level of understanding of what is going on between you two and helps you be more effective dealing with the individual. I know, it’s weird but it works.

Here’s a quick secret for getting along and playing nicely in the sandbox: When something goes amiss, don’t look for guilt, look for cause. Focus on correcting the situation and not blaming anyone. The former develops support, the latter enmity.

While he mentions it in a more general context of human relations, it is a good reminder for managers whose employee screws up on a task and the situation calls for feedback.

Depending upon the gravity of the situation and the history of the employee involved, it’s hard not to swing directly to the blame option. Judgments of the employee as incompetent, uncaring, or even malicious flow into our mind. This just makes us angry, a rather destructive frame-of-mind in which to engage the employee in “constructive” feedback, wouldn’t you say?

Operating from a place of anger or frustration activates what author Seth Godin calls our reptile mind, causing us to block out other explanations. We neglect to consider the staffer’s skill level (training) or other external forces in play such as lack of resources, too many pressures on the employee, or difficulties in the system of work and information flow.

Blame speaks–not favorably–to the imagined intention of the individual. If it is their fault, why look beyond the person to other possible contributing causes?

We need to program into our minds–yes, we’re talking about a mental habit here–a default response that scans for cause, not blame, when a staff member falls short of acceptable performance. Your spirit of problem-solving has a chance of turning around performance AND building a more trusting relationship. The other way never will.

Of the group that said their boss focused on strengths, 61% were “engaged” in their work. 45% of those reporting a boss who attended primarily to their weaknesses were engaged but, at the same time, 22% were “actively disengaged.” Except for the appearance of the actively disengaged group, focusing on areas to be development or turned around didn’t do too much damage.

But here’s the shocker. Look at the right hand column, reflecting employees whose boss essentially ignored both strong and weak points, in other words, giving no meaningful feedback at all. Virtually none of these (2%) were engaged and the rest were either neutral or disengaged.

“But, wait a minute,” you say, “maybe engaged employees, the keeners, are more inclined to see their boss as noticing and commenting on their strengths. Besides, since they are engaged, they probably are demonstrating their best talents on the job anyway. Their boss is just noticing what’s clearly evident.” This, of course, is the classic question with a correlation between two variables: which one is influencing which?

Let’s not go there. Instead, just consider the consequences of not giving your people any concrete feedback to speak of. It can severely dampen your employees’ level of engagement in their work. With all the data out there linking employee engagement to business results, we are talking lost productivity and creativity–big time!

25% of that “ignored” group of employees had a boss who gave no feedback. I hope you wouldn’t have been one of them.

Now take this concept micro, down to the one-on-one relation between you (the boss) and one of your employees who is listless, sloppy, and clearly underperforming. You want him to change…to a new way of working: doing the job asked of him. If this individual is, in fact, capable of doing the job well, the problem is one of attitude, of lack of motivation.

The best leaders at the mid level are able to turn around this commitment thing. They:

• Clearly lay out what they expect from their under performer
• Raise for discussion current gap in his performance
• Express their belief in his ability to do the job well
• Lay out the benefits, to both the employee and the organization, of a solid job performance
• Involve him in identifying the obstacles to his performing better
• Get him (i.e. not the boss) to come up with a plan to turn around his performance
• Reach agreement on the plan, with specific actions, measures and time frames

Going deeper, the leader might probe into what the employee wants from his job, what motivates him, and what’s missing for him as a motivator in his current work. All the while, in the background hangs the potential for consequences if the staff member chooses not to change. The leader brings tough love to the situation.

The best bosses foster a mindset of high performance in their unit. They get all of their people to want success and want to perform at a level of which they can be personally proud. Almost all of your people want these–success, pride, accomplishment. You can count on this because they are human beings. When you first confront a poor performer, however, they just don’t realize that they do.