It can be a frustrating and an all-too-common scenario.

There’s an issue with an individual’s or a teams’ conduct or performance.  The issue has been allowed to go unaddressed for longer than it should have, but the time for change has come.  We all know things might have been different if the manager had addressed the issue earlier, but we are where we are.  You set the manager’s expectation that the issue will need to be addressed through an appropriate process, and you do your best to ensure that the language to be used by the manager in the invitation, the meeting and any follow up documentation is appropriate and proportionate.  Despite this, the employee or team reacts poorly.  You might receive allegations of bullying, or perhaps a medical certificate.  If it’s a team, you’ll often observe the conversation to have counter-productive impacts on team culture, including levels of morale and engagement.

These situations can be complex (mainly because of the ‘human element’ rather than any legal aspects), but why does this happen so often?  In short, it’s commonly because while the employee or team has heard what has been said, they’ve also seen what happens.

In these situations, any language short of complete reassurance or an almost-promise that nothing bad is going to occur, is unlikely to dilute the employee’s or teams’ perception of what the manager and the organisation do, or are likely to do, in these situations.  Obviously, you generally can’t (or shouldn’t) give those assurances or make those promises, but you also need to address the problem now.

Building and maintaining a culture of alignment between what we say and what we do is crucial.

• It’s critical to building and maintaining trust and credibility. If on enough occasions our actions don’t align with our words, then our people will lose trust in the words we use, and they will instead prioritise our actions as the source from which to distil understanding.  Without trust and credibility, our relationships can never be as productive as we want them to be, and leadership will never be as effective as we expect.
• It encourages communication. It’s hard to have productive conversations based on past and predicted future actions, particularly if what’s being said is itself untrusted.  If our people can trust our words, there’s a solid basis for conversations and building understanding.  It also creates a team culture where communications have the significance they should.
• It creates an environment of engagement. If our people are required to distil understanding from our conduct, we’re inevitably left with a chaotic or insistent set of understandings based retrospectively on individual experience, rather than proactively upon communicated vision and direction.

• It encourages a culture of accountability. If our words and actions don’t align, our people don’t trust the words and won’t hold themselves accountable to the standards we direct.  Similarly, a lack of alignment fosters an environment where our people don’t consider that they will (or should) be held accountable for delivering on their own commitments.

So where does this take us?

There’s the obvious need for proactive focus on ensuring future alignment.  That’s going to be easier said than done, take more time than we’d like, and require everyday cultural change (including ensuring the alignment is demonstrated top-down).  Each occasion we fail to deliver alignment will be a backward step, and we’ll ultimately be like the proverbial frog trying to climb out of the well.

But we often won’t have the luxury of that time.  In the here-and-now, if we suspect there’s a history of non‑alignment we need to actively take that into account in the honesty and authenticity of the language we’re about to use with the individual or team now.  In some situations, that might also include the need to call ourselves out for our prior inconsistencies as a means of creating an admittedly fragile basis on which to build short term trust in what we’re saying now.  Ultimately though, and given the source of our issue, we need to identify and build-in tangible ways to demonstrate the short-term alignment of our words to our actions when setting up an ongoing process.  In other words, when we say that this process is intended to assist the employee improve their performance, we need to build a process that minimises them understanding that this is a process that we need to go through before terminating the employment.