As HR consultants we talk a lot about performance and the consequences of working with colleagues who underperform, and yet their performance goes unchecked. Every day we hear reasons why performance can't be addressed, such as fear of difficult conversations, fear of absence, fear of maintaining ratios.
When a nursery leader decides to address underperformance with confidence, what they will quickly appreciate is that the unkind thing to do is to leave it unchecked.
The first stage in being kind is to write and maintain job descriptions. If you have written a job description and identified that someone is not performing the job as expected, you should talk to them about this. They may be confident to share their strengths and weaknesses at this stage, and the informal conversation is powerful to address the gap.
Equally likely is that they may not recognise the discrepancy and will be unable to improve their performance following an informal conversation. As a second stage we would recommend using a CEDAR technique conversation. This is a structured, semi-formal conversation where the manager sets out to clarify expectations, explain what is happening, and discuss what the employee can do about this discrepancy, and can be very powerful.
We often hear if someone is underperforming that we should train them. This can be the correct response, but not always. If your underperformer lacks the ‘will’ and ‘the skill’ then the nursery leader should not be looking at training and development. However, if they have the ‘will’ but lack the ‘skill’ then training is effective in addressing the underperformance.
Once poor performance has been raised, it needs to be followed up. Having difficult conversations is challenging, but not managing poor performance is going to create harder challenges to resolve.
