When you are the leader, there will come times where you have to critique the performance of those whom you are leading. Their work is not meeting the standards that have been set and you must confront them. How do you critique but not detract from the confidence of the person you are critiquing? How do you correct his work but have him continue to come to work with a positive attitude?
You may consider thinking about the following five thoughts listed below.
1. Action Vs. Person
In their outstanding book, The One Minute Manager, Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson emphasized that you critique the action, not the person. A number of coaches in the athletic arena don’t believe this. They think you criticise both the action and the person. By addressing both you get the attention of the person and he will be motivated to do better.
I played for a coach who believed the person had to be addressed harshly to get the player to improve his performance. I found that to keep my confidence, I literally tuned him out when he was ripping me. The problem, however, was when he was teaching some very important concepts for improvement, I still had him tuned out.
I then played for a coach in college, Gordie Gillespie, who surely corrected poor performance. When he yelled you knew it! However, in the four years I played for him, I never heard him attack the personhood of one of our players. It was always the action.
Read 5 Things That True Leaders Should NEVER Do
I think there can be one exception to this philosophy. When you have corrected the action of the person whom you are leading a number of times but he refuses to change, you may have to address the person.
We had an athlete on one of our basketball teams at the University of St. Francis who would go to the end of the bench when we took him out of a game. We wanted all of our players to come to the bench and sit by an assistant coach and talk about the game. He paid no attention to our mandate and continued to not sit by a coach.
The third or fourth time he did this, I told one of our assistant coaches to escort him across the court to the locker room during a time-out. I instructed our coach to inform him that I would ask him one question at half time – does he want to be part of our team or not.
I was glad his decision was to stay with us because he was a very good player! I hated to embarrass him but he had no right to embarrass our team. He never went to the end of the bench after that incident.
2. Sandwich Theory
The sandwich theory can be a way of getting your critique across to a person without detracting from his confidence or his positive attitude. You sandwich the critique between two positive comments. This is a useful method to critique without breaking confidence.
I could say something like this to one of our basketball players. “You know you are an excellent player, so why would you make the difficult or fancy pass instead of the easier pass to keep our offense moving? Now get back to the court and show everyone why you are an All-Conference player.”
He hopefully got the point that the fancy pass is often intercepted and we don’t want it in our offensive game. Were he to continue to make the difficult pass, he would be sitting next to us on the bench! In sport, the bench is the great equalizer.
3. Mean What You Say
There is a maxim that states, “Mean what you say and say what you mean.” You don’t want to beat around the bush when you have to deliver criticism; you want to be specific. You want to be straight forward in approaching the problem.
I only participated in one intervention and that was definitely a time to mean what you say. We had to confront a person on alcoholism. We had our team present along with a psychologist who taught us how to conduct the intervention.
