360 Critical Communication Skills Leaders and Managers Use to Address Secondhand Performance Concerns without Damaging Trust

Speaker A: In this episode, you'll learn what to say and do when someone tells you about a team member's performance issue, but you did not see it yourself. Welcome to Leadership without losing your Soul, a podcast helping human centered leaders master communication to accelerate your team's performance, reduce stress, and build a career with the respect and influence you deserve. I'm your host, David Dye, president of let's Grow Leaders. Uh, welcome to the show. Today you'll get specific skills to handle a challenging leadership and management scenario. Second hand feedback. You'll learn what to do and say when you get a report that someone's not doing their job or acting poorly. And you'll be able to address it in a way that helps the team member move to performance if they need to, doesn't damage trust, and prevents conflict from spreading. So let's get into it. Here's the situation. Someone on your team has a problem. You know this because a colleague told you, or a ah, customer complained, or your counterpart on the night shift left you a note. You weren't there, you didn't see it. Now what? And this is one of the most common, most avoided conversations in distributed work. So whether you manage across shifts, oversee a field team, you're leading a remote group. You've probably received a report about behavior you didn't witness yourself. And there are two leadership pitfalls here. The first one is that you overreact. And this is where you treat the report as settled fact. You heard this, you read it, it's true. That's mistake number one. Second mistake is to underreact. It's to convince yourself that you can't do anything because you weren't there and you didn't see or hear yourself. Both of these responses get you in trouble, and they're going to undermine and diminish your credibility and influence as a leader. So here's how you get it right. First thing you want to do is you got to get curious about those employee complaints. So second hand information and employee complaints about a co worker, or even if it's coming from a customer, doesn't have to come from an employee. It can come from a customer. All of these require an extra dose of curiosity. So the first question you want to ask yourself is, what did you hear really? Before you say anything to the employee, consider what you actually heard. Not all secondhand reports are the same. Their credibility can depend on factors like the source's motive, whether the account's corroborated, is there anything else that's going to validate it, and whether it's internally consistent, so you can run through a few quick questions before anything else. Who reported this? What's their relationship to the employee? Is there a specific behavior being described or just a general impression? Are they sharing their interpretation or was there something specific that they observed? And if you're talking with that individual and they had a general impression or an interpretation, it can be helpful to ask them what did they actually see or hear? Is this isolated or part of a pattern that you've heard from multiple sources? Are there any documented records? Are there emails, timestamps, anything that backs it up? Now, after you get curious and ask those kinds of questions, the next thing you want to do is take stock of your own biases. We all have things that we're biased about, and your reaction to the employee and to any issues about this employee are going to be shaped by impressions you had before the reports of the complaints arrive. If you already find an employee difficult, sometimes that secondhand information can feel like confirmation. If you like the person and you trust them, it's a lot more likely that you're going to doubt that negative feedback. It's called confirmation bias, and it's one of the most common problems that you'll face with secondhand reports and information. Um, there's also proximity bias. Proximity bias compounds this. In distributed environments where managers tend to rate invoices person employees higher on social dimensions, the person you see every day can feel more credible to you than the person you manage from a distance, even when the data doesn't support it. It's just the way our brains work. So having these biases in mind, you want to treat the secondhand report as a hypothesis to investigate rather than quickly judging or dismissing it. So we've gotten curious, checked our own biases, at least created some self awareness. The next thing we're going to do is gather information. You want to get your own information. Now, absence of direct observation here, the fact that you got it secondhand, that doesn't mean the problem isn't real. What it does mean is that you're going to have to be more deliberate before you schedule the conversation. Some more ways to get curious here as you investigate. Can you review available documentation related to the reported incident? Can you ask a neutral party, someone without a stake in the outcome, whether they've observed anything similar? Can you do a clarity check where expectations around this behavior clearly communicated in the first place, and loop in HR to understand if similar concerns have come up before? All of this information is going to be helpful to you. So document what you Know what you don't know and how you're thinking through it. Even when this doesn't rise to the level of a formal investigation, these kind of habits are going to protect both you and the employee. Okay, so we've gotten curious, checked our own biases, We've gathered as much information as we can. Now we need to have the conversation. So how do you talk with the person that the second hand information the secondhand report was about? You're going to set the stage for a meaningful conversation by starting with a really positive goal. Your goal here is not to deliver a verdict. Your goal is to get clarity together, specifically what happened, what are the effects and what needs to change. This is where the Inspire method. If you've been listening to the show for a while, you've certainly heard the Inspire method. If you have not. This is your first episode. Welcome to the show. But also want to encourage you to check out the Inspire method in episode 303. 303. And you're going to get all the details there on how to have these accountability conversations. Generally speaking. But in short, for our purposes right now, you're going to connect with your intent for the conversation, the facts as you know them, and your concern for the employee. So we start with connection, then we're going to move to curiosity. Get curious about their perspective and their solutions. And finally you close with commitment. Commitment to next steps. What did you hear and what are those next steps? So here's a direct, connected way to begin the conversation. Specific words you can use. Hey, I want to talk about something I heard regarding and whatever the subject was regarding what went down in this morning's meeting. Um, regarding what happened on site with that client visit. And then you continue and find out what happened from your perspective. So putting that all together, I want to talk about something I heard regarding subject and find out about what happened from your perspective. Then move to the facts as you know them. Now, this is where you have to be very careful because vague feedback will automatically trigger defensiveness. I've heard you can be. Difficult is not useful. Difficult is an interpretation, not a fact. So we got to start with facts. Instead. You'll try something like this. I received a report that on Tuesday you told a colleague that their work was worthless in front of the rest of the team. Notice that you're sharing the report, not your conclusion. The fact is I heard that you. Okay, that's a fact. You did X. That's not the same thing. So I heard that you versus you did this. Two different statements. The first I heard that you is factual. It's honest. The second overstates your certainty. You don't know what actually happened. So frame it accurately. This came to my attention. I received a report that not this happened. So a few things to keep in mind as you go in. When you connect, be upfront about how you learned about the situation. You don't need to share every detail of the specific person who told you, especially if it's a dicey kind of situation or, you know, really concerns about retaliation or that kind of thing. But you do need to be honest that this came to you secondhand. Employees in distributed environments are especially alert to the feeling that someone's reporting on them. So if you're not transparent about where you're coming from, the conversation, conversation can derail fast and people get defensive. Well, why didn't just come to me? Well, that's worth having a conversation about. But you can start by acknowledging, hey, I received a report about this. This came to me secondhand. Then we're going to get curious. And this is asking. Before you say or tell anything, before you describe what was reported, you can create space for their perspective. For example, can you walk me through what happened with the meeting or with that client visit? Instead of criticizing an employee for poor performance, investigate what happened and why. You're not dismissing the report when you do this, you're acknowledging that you have incomplete information. And getting theirs can often help you walk through what happened from their perspective. And you'll often discern the truth in all of that. As you have that conversation and you can figure out, okay, what was going on here, you can then move to commitment. You can reinforce expectations, why they matter, and whether or not every detail of the report that you got is accurate. There's often something worth addressing. Maybe it's the behavior itself, maybe it's the perception that it created, or the expectation gap that allowed it to exist in the first place. So what effects did that have? What needs to be different going forward? What support would help? If there is a legitimate issue, just having the conversation itself is going to alert the employee to the need for change. Or it might alert you that there's a need for more support here. Either way, you can end the conversation by scheduling time in a week or two to review those next steps and how things are going. So you have this conversation. You start by saying, hey, listen, want to talk about, uh, I received a report on Tuesday that you told a colleague that their work was worthless in front of the group. Can you walk me through what happened in that meeting from your perspective and they walk you through whatever, you know, I don't remember saying exactly that, but I was frustrated and da, da, da. Okay, so what do you think the uh, impact, the feeling, uh, that that left your colleagues with might be? All right. How do you think you can handle those situations? Regardless of whether those are the exact words that happen or not, They've shared that they were frustrated, might not have dealt with it the best way. Okay, great. How do you think you can handle that going forward in a more productive way? Next time you're frustrated, what else can you try? All right, sounds like you're going to do this. That's great. Do I have that right? Excellent. Let's get together next Friday and see how it's going. And that get together can be on a zoom call on Microsoft Teams, what have you. Okay, so let's build some infrastructure now to make these kinds of conversations easier. The hardest conversations are usually the ones you avoid the longest. And these secondhand type of employee complaints or issues that are brought to you are challenging. And in those distributed environments it's easy to avoid them. You can end the avoidance, stop depending on random observation and build a feedback system that doesn't require you to be in the room. So here are a few ideas on how to do this. First, invest in clarity. So many of these types of situations can be avoided if you've got clear written expectations. Written expectations with a clear what an outcome measure, the why spelled out and how those specific behaviors and habits. All of that eliminates oh, I didn't know that was a problem type of excuses. Documentation practices that make both expectations and outcomes visible regardless of location or shift regular one on ones and skip level meetings. Those regular consistent structured check ins create ongoing feedback opportunities beyond just when something goes wrong. So you get more of a sense of what are the patterns and the rhythms. Uh, another is peer input multi source feedback. So you're not the only vantage point on behavior and vitally equip your team to have accountability conversations and be able to talk directly with one another. Teach them all the Inspire methods. That rhythm of starting with connection and our intent moving to curiosity, ending with commitment. You can go to the Inspire method for the full full thing. That's episode 303 again. But resolve those issues before they become bigger problems. When people can just talk about them and have the tools to do that interpersonally. So with that kind of infrastructure in place, you'll have fewer surprise crises and you'll be able to handle the disruptions before they escalate now. There is a time with these things. You need to go straight to human resources. The strategies that I'm sharing here. These are how you address employee complaints or second hand reports when behavior fell short. The person needs coaching, they need accountability. But for employee secondhand type of complaints or reports that involve potential misconduct, harassment, discrimination, safety violations, ethical breaches, illegal activity, all of those sorts of things, you're dealing with legal issues and you need to involve your human resource partners immediately and follow the formal process there. So you do all that. And addressing employee complaints, especially when you're leading people you can't always see, requires more intentionality. Invest in clarity about expectations and outcomes. Connect with honesty about what you know and humility about what you don't. Get curious about their perspective and solutions. Commit with scheduled follow through, even if it's just to check in. You don't need to witness whatever secondhand report you got. You don't have to witness the behavior to address it. Just bring the same care and consistent fairness you'd bring to any other difficult conversation. And that's how you do it. And if you want to equip the leaders in your organization with practical human centered performance management tools like these, give me a shout. Love to help you. David Dye Dyet's GrowLeaders.com and if you enjoyed this episode, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any of these practical communication skills to help you accelerate your team's performance, reduce stress, and build a career with the respect and the influence you deserve. Until next time, I'm your host, David Dye, reminding you to be the leader you'd want your boss to be. Uh,