HRdownloads Blog

It’s Friday morning before the long weekend, and you’re looking forward to a quick workday. When you arrive to work, you find an unexpected notice. The employee you let go last month has made a claim of wrongful dismissal. You wonder how this can be; you provided the employee with a verbal warning, then a written warning, followed by a three-day suspension before they were terminated. Surely, you’ve done enough to cover yourself legally, right?

Progressive discipline is a great management tool when used effectively. Unfortunately, two steps are often missed during the coaching stage: support and facilitation. Going through the motions is not enough—employers need to actively engage in the process. The intent of progressive discipline is to provide employees with opportunities to modify or correct inadequate performance and behaviour. Without actively supporting employees and facilitating opportunities for performance improvements, that purpose is undermined.

Have you ever come across someone who rubs you the wrong way? Maybe you can’t quite put your finger on why—maybe you know exactly why—but tolerating the person is a constant challenge. Now, imagine that person is your employee and reports directly to you. What do you do?

Many managers will come across this a few times in their career. One of the drawbacks to a management role is that you don’t always get to pick your direct reports. Perhaps you inherited the employee when starting a new management role, or the organization restructured and your team had an open spot. No matter how they got there, you are their manager and need to be able to work with and manage them effectively.

Do you remember the board game Guess Who? Players race against each other to identify their opponent’s character by considering physical characteristics like clothing, glasses, and hairstyles. Surveying your work team for the difficult employee who may be causing turmoil behind the scenes can make you feel like you’re playing a grown-up version of Guess Who?, but instead of the obvious signs, employers often have to rely on behavioural clues.

When trying to find the perfect employee, you may have preconceived notions of whether you need an introvert or extravert in the role. Outgoingness and shyness have been linked to extraversion and introversion, respectively, as explanations for people’s personalities, but these simple concepts are misleading. As a leader, you can help ensure that you maximize employee potential, despite differing personalities.

Enacting disciplinary measures against your employees is never pleasant or easy, but most of the time, it’s at least straightforward. Someone does something wrong, so you issue a warning; if the bad behaviour persists, you escalate the discipline until, as a last resort, you terminate their employment. With a well-written policy guiding the disciplinary process, and other policies explaining what sort of behaviour would trigger that process, you can be reasonably confident that you’ll be able to handle any sort of transgression.

It’s a rainy Monday morning and you’ve missed your train, and now you’re late to your first meeting. In a rush, you spill coffee on your jacket just before getting onto the elevator with—who else?—your boss, and she reminds you about that report you didn’t submit on Friday afternoon. All this and it’s not even 10 a.m. yet.

Reflecting on the Second World War, Winston Churchill is known to have remarked, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” The quotation suggests that when the unexpected happens, or when your best laid plans go awry—perhaps especially then—you should take some time to consider what happened and how you could improve your response in the future. Of course, you don’t need to wait until after a crisis to think about how you will respond to a future challenge. When business is going well, it may seem impossible that a crisis could rock your organization, yet we can’t always see a crisis coming. Having a crisis response strategy in place will help you prepare for when the unpredictable occurs.