Reality Checks Are a Royal Pain For Bosses of Underperformers --- Managers have a tough job giving feedback to employees who think their work is better than it is

"They think their most banal ideas are brilliant, ignore signs that they're struggling and treat corrections like suggestions.

They believe they're God's gifts but are actually employees from hell, and if you've been a manager at any level then you've probably had one. In fact, the odds that you're managing a delusional worker may be higher than ever.

Lots of companies scrapped or de-emphasized reviews during the pandemic, leaving some employees unsure where they stood, or lulling others into a false sense that they're crushing it. Desperate to retain employees, businesses tolerated mediocrity or praised people simply for showing up.

Now companies are ruthlessly focused on efficiency, and that means managers are charged with reinstituting more biting formal evaluations. Good luck getting through at a time when the very word "feedback" can be triggering for some. Nearly four in 10 employees who received the lowest grades from managers last year had rated themselves as highly valued by the organization, according to data from BambooHR, which analyzed almost two million assessments for The Wall Street Journal.

Delivering a reality check to an overconfident underperformer is one of the toughest tasks bosses face, because there is no guarantee critiques will click.

"I had somebody who outright told me, 'I heard your feedback, but I disagreed with it,'" says Sara Censoprano, associate director of client experience at Movable Ink, a marketing software company.

She's decided to be more explicit with staff about what's a recommendation and what's an order. She also asks new members of her team how they want to hear constructive criticism. Managers who dread the inevitable confrontations with clueless people would be wise to ask, up front, whether employees prefer bad news face-to-face, or in an email, so they can digest it ahead of a conversation, Censoprano says. As a boss, it's a way to C.Y.A. against future complaints about your leadership. Botch the delivery of hard truth, and you or your company could be in for a one-star review of your own.

An ex-Cloudflare employee recently went viral for filming her firing and said she'd received no indication that she wasn't measuring up. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince called the video painful to watch and said managers should have clearly communicated expectations and whether they were being met: "No employee should ever actually be surprised they weren't performing."

"I have worked with people who truly believed that they were doing a good job and were not delivering at all," says Jill Snider, who leads a content-acquisition team at a large entertainment company. "I've had to sit them down and be like, 'This is reality, and we need you to meet these milestones or you're not going to have a future with this company.' "

Selective hearing can be a reason, she says. People cling to small compliments received for fulfilling basic duties and block out critical feedback on bigger tasks -- only to react with surprise when told they're doing poorly. Other times, employees have been clearing low hurdles without realizing the true bar for success is much higher.

Tim Newhard thought he was being patient and kind with a low-performer on his team. Several years ago, in a previous job, one of his reports wasn't cutting it but reminded him of himself in other ways. So Newhard avoided tough conversations, hoping the situation would fix itself. Then came annual-review season, his honest assessment, and an ugly interaction.

"It was traumatic," he says. "This person reacted in a very unprofessional way, and it became an ongoing issue for us." The relationship never recovered. Newhard eventually moved on to another company.

Now a vice president at RailPros, a civil-engineering and transit-consulting firm, he aims to prevent unpleasant surprises and gives candid, real-time feedback in weekly or biweekly one-on-ones. Once they get over the shock of critiques, some employees appreciate the chance to improve before negative appraisals go into their personnel files, he says.

Eric Mariasis, a software engineer, says he wishes managers had been more direct when he was struggling to adjust to a new team at a previous employer. The group worked differently from others he'd been in at the same company, and he sensed that his pace of production lagged behind some peers. Yet supervisors were consistently encouraging, he says, so he figured he must have been doing fine.

Until he was called into an impromptu meeting and told that he wasn't working out for the very reason he suspected -- slow output. He took the hint and transferred internally before he could be reassigned involuntarily or cut.

His advice to unsatisfied managers everywhere: "Just be as honest as you can be without purposely devastating [someone's] feelings."

Gymnastics is a complicated sport, but every maneuver has an agreed-upon point value. Employee ratings should work the same way, says David Fallarme, vice president of marketing at Owner.com, a maker of online ordering systems for restaurants.

"From somebody's onboarding, you should have a framework of what a gold medal looks like, what a silver medal looks like, what a bronze medal looks like," he says.

Formulating a rubric consumes a lot of mental energy for bosses and can seem unnecessary at the time of hiring, when managers are generally optimistic about their new additions. But bosses ought to prepare on day one for the possibility of disappointment, Fallarme adds. Setting clear targets from the get-go makes it easier to tell people later that they failed to stick their landings.

In some cases, no amount of care and preparation is enough, says Andrea Taylor, who worked in higher-education development for more than two decades and now consults with nonprofits on fundraising efforts. Her line of work is pretty clear-cut, she notes. You raise money or you don't. Then again, everyone hits dry spells, and it can be hard for fundraisers who are coming up empty to tell whether they should keep trying or wake up to the reality that they're not very good.

"I've had people in complete denial, right up to the point of having to let them go," she says. "In those cases, I kind of shift the conversation into: Is this really what you want to do?"

Maybe some reflection will prevent the same fate in the next job, she figures." [1]

1.  On the Clock: Reality Checks Are a Royal Pain For Bosses of Underperformers --- Managers have a tough job giving feedback to employees who think their work is better than it is. Borchers, Callum.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 07 Mar 2024: A.10.