What do you do if you have a problem employee or an employee with a persistent performance problem? How do you deal with that? There are three kinds of employee performance problems -- Productivity, Quality and Behavior. Productivity means the employee is not doing enough work fast enough. Quality means that an employee is missing some details or not dotting their I's or crossing their T's. A behavior problem could be some irritating behavior. Maybe they curse in the workplace or they dress inappropriately or they stomp around and have temper tantrums. There are all kinds of behavior issues.

And here is what we tell managers: the first thing you have to do is focus on coaching the employee on solutions. If you have a productivity problem, that means you have to break big goals into smaller goals, break smaller goals into lists of concrete actions and create time budgets for each concrete action. If you have a quality problem, that means you need to provide more guidelines, parameters and specifications. You need to focus more on the how to and you have to provide checklists. If you have a behavior problem, the big mistake that managers make is focusing on the problem. Try telling someone with an attitude problem, "You've got a bad attitude." It's not a good idea! You have to describe the behavior that is inappropriate, but much more important, you have to describe the behavior that you want to see instead.

So the first question that you should ask yourself if you have an employee with a persistent performance problem is, "Is it you or is it me?" What we found is that most persistent performance problems are the fault of the manager. The manager is not coaching the employee on how to work faster, how to work better, or how to behave in a way that is appropriate in that workplace.