How to Hold Difficult Employees Accountable
Have you ever had a conversation with someone where you felt crystal clear on what they were going to do after your conversation, only to have them do the complete opposite of what you thought you had agreed on? Or have you ever had to continually have the same conversation over and over again? Maybe it’s the clean your room talk with one of your kids, or the you need to be on time talk with one of your employees, or the I need the directions before not after the turn talk with your spouse. If you’re like me, you’ve been on both the giving and receiving end of those talks at some point in your life. When giving those talks, you question why this is so hard? And when receiving those talks, you wonder when this person will ever stop talking about this?
The secret is what we call the CPR method, which in this case is not for breathing life into someone’s lungs but for breathing life back into tired conversations.
The C stands for content and in this first talk we talk about the content of what went wrong. We made an agreement to have the room cleaned by Friday at 5 and your room is still dirty. You need to clean your room.
If it is still an issue after your C conversation, then we switch to a P conversation. P stands for Pattern and in this conversation, our focus is not on the cleanliness of the room, but rather on the pattern and the repeated nature of the fault. In this case, what is upsetting is not just that the room is still dirty but that this is becoming a recurring pattern. The conversation should feel different both to you and to your kid because the conversation is about breaking this pattern of disobedience, not about cleanliness. This allows both sides to take a fresh perspective rather than hashing out the same old gripes, driving an increased likelihood of behavior change.
If this is still an issue after your P conversation, then we switch to an R conversation. R stands for Relationship and our focus will be on how the breach of trust is affecting the relationship between the two of you. Again, this should feel like an entirely different conversation than the C or P conversations, and brings a heightened emotional level to the conversation. What once was a conversation about cleanliness has become a conversation about a lack of trust created by the natural consequences of your kid’s failure to clean their room repeatedly. Perhaps now that trust has been lost, they are going to lose access to screen time or their car. I think the Relationship conversation is especially poignant in work settings when you as a boss are able to say that the team is losing trust in the late individual. Now some on the team have been so hurt by the repeated behavior that they question whether this person should even be on the team because they have so many times had to cover for this non-dependable person.
