Fearing they’ll crush employees’ confidence and erode performance, employers are asking managers to ease up on harsh feedback.
If you don’t have anything nice to say, upper management has a tip:
Try harder.
“
Accentuate the positive” has become a new mantra at workplaces, where bosses now dole out frequent praise, urge employees to celebrate small victories and focus performance reviews around a particular worker’s strengths instead.
The shift may annoy leaders who rose in a tough-love era in business, but executives say
hard-edge tactics simply do more harm than good.
When employees’ flaws are laid bare, “there’s that mental ‘ugh’ and shrug of, ‘This is who I am’. Entry level managers will lose the presumed power of fault finding.
For years, those discussions focused largely on employee missteps and where they needed to improve. Bit by bit, consulting firm are changing the way managers evaluate employee performance.
“We would bring them in and beat them down a bit,”. After the reviews, some employees left the company as their confidence and performance slipped; others seemed rattled.
Now, managers are expected to extol staffers’ strengths during reviews and check-ins, explaining how the person can use his or her talents to tackle aspects of the job that come less naturally. Bosses[some may be unqualified] are advised to mention no more than one or two areas that require development. Just a though.
