1.  Do they respect you

Why are you giving advice to this leader?  Is it necessary to help improve their performance?  Do you have a stake in their success?  Does the leader trust your motives, your interest in their success, and your knowledge about the subject.  Do they have reason to believe you have some expertise in the subject?  The confidence the leader has in your genuine concern for them, your expertise about the subject, and your common interest in their success will greatly influence their willingness to listen and act on your coaching guidance.  Do you have the authority to enforce negative or positive consequences for this leader?  If so, you can get compliance even without the above considerations, but you will get much better and longer lasting results if the above are all true.

2.  Have they bought into the quantitative assessment of their performance and agree with the feedback?

If the measurements show the leader’s performance is very good, employees buy-in easily; so if you are getting disagreement, we can assume the measurements show performance shortcomings.  However, the measurement tools have been carefully built over a long time to be resilient.  They come from extremely diverse observations and this diversity provides extremely accurate placement.  The absolute number may not be perfectly accurate to the decimal point, but the ranking information is accurate and reliable.  Receiving this news, if it is bad, drives a person through the stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.  Respect this process but be firm.  Use hard metrics to verify the measurements and accelerate the process, but be tactful and kind (Please see the 5 Stages of Grief)

3.  Do they agree with the qualitative assessment regarding the upside benefits of improving and the downside consequences of not improving?

The next step in this process is to gain buy-in.  Change is difficult.  Do you have the evidence or experience to justify your prediction of a better future state if the leader undertakes the change you expect?  Does the leader agree that if their performance changed, the results would be better for the entire organization? Continue reading →