Q:  I’m about to do the first-year evaluation on an employee I’ve supervised for three months.  Her performance is average in some areas but actually needs improvement in most areas.   The problem:  I’ve overheard her being confident about the great job she’s doing.  What’s the best approach when evaluating an employee with an unrealistically high opinion of their performance?

A:  Yikes!  I feel your pain.  In my experience, these situations usually occur when the employee receives little to no feedback regarding performance and assumes that “no news is good news”.  Or worse, when employees receive sugar-coated feedback –with no mention of problems—and assume “I’m doing well”.  An example might be a receptionist who thinks she’s great with customers because the supervisor hasn’t mentioned the long list of customer complaints.  Those are difficult conversations, and supervisors avoid them.

In your case, I’ll suppose your employee is confident about her performance because she hasn’t been informed otherwise.  Your job now is to gently burst this bubble without causing motivational harm to the employee.  You want to preserve morale and increase the likelihood that she will put forth the effort needed to improve.  How do you do that?

Do your homework, get your facts.  We are more receptive to feedback (especially if negative or different from our beliefs) when we think the speaker knows what they’re talking about.  Employees are no different.  Ask previous supervisors and co-workers for input, become familiar with her record, good and bad.  Ask the employee to complete a self-evaluation form (available online) which asks about accomplishments, strengths, interests, areas they want to improve.

Give a little slack.  After you’ve discussed the areas to be improved and the plan to get there during the meeting, make sure you allow plenty of time for changes to occur.  More importantly, provide her support, guidance and feedback along the way.  Ask what you can do to help her succeed on the job (training, coaching, equipment, change in schedule, whatever).

In my experience, these type of employees are very motivated to improve and work hard  to restore their self image.  So if handled well, the odds for improvement are in your employee’s favor.

© Copyright Eva Del Rio  Published in The Gainesville Sun on September 4, 2011