Claire Williams

Firstly seek to understand if they had clarity in the first instance over the task(s) that were delegated and the expected due date, and if there are any mitigating circumstances that prevented delivery. Assuming it was understood, then work to understand if it's a capability or conduct issue - do they know how to do the task or where to seek support if not, or are they simply choosing not to do the work. Work to really get to the root cause and then tailor your approach and rebuild expectations from there, providing the appropriate support or guardrails in place to give the employee the best possible chance of success.

Understand the problem to a really granular level - a lot of the time the process of getting employees to document everything enables them to re-establish control of the situation and re-prioritise / de-prioritise themselves. However, once you've got full visibility you can then work to remove barriers, re-align expectations of deadlines where possible, and generally work to understand what solutions are available to help ease any route causes of stress. Ensure you are offering any alternative forms of support available to you (mental health, wellbeing, time off) and continue to be someone that they are able to discuss and confide in.

Create a cadence that is focussed on value add and not just getting together for the sake of it because you think it will improve communication, engagement, and productivity. Get feedback from your teams to understand how they work and how you can get the best out of them (use profiling tools if needed), and build and weekly and month cadence of meetings and 121’s that will encourage the desired outputs and team productivity.

Company performance fundamentally stems from company capability - from the most senior leaders to the most junior. Work from the bottom up to reassess your target operating model and what capabilities you need to deliver a successful business. Developing or hiring the right capabilities is half the challenge, but you have to ensure you really understand them fully first.

Having a really robust 1/3/6 month onboarding process including pre-defined review forms for the manager and employee to work through, driving the right topics of conversation around performance against the job profile and or onboarding programme, drilling into training and support requirements, and identifying objectives at the appropriate stage. This, complimented by regular check-ins from the people team with both the manager and employee have been really effective.