Here’s something I’ve seen that we fall into every now and then that hardly ever serves us.

It’s when we manage people from our opinions and conclusions about
a staff member’s behavior instead of managing from their actual behavior.

Let me explain.

Say we ask an employee to rotate some stock and they roll their eyes, sigh and walk off and do just what we’ve asked of them.

We then approach them to manage a poor communication moment and say something like,” I need to talk to you about being rude (or immature, disrespectful, etc.) when I asked you to…”

They retort, “I wasn’t being rude; I was just frustrated.”

Now we’re off and running, discussing what kind of emotion they were displaying instead of the actual incident itself.

However, if we first say “I noticed you rolled your eyes and sighed when I asked you to rotate the stock”. Now we left our conclusions and opinions behind and are dealing just with observed facts.

Get the difference?

If we just state facts, the conversation doesn’t get personal and veer off into emotional sidetracks. It’s clear and to the point.

Another example, to a clerk:
Instead of “you were being really emotional with that customer”, we shift to “when you spoke to that customer your voice was raised and you made the statement – ‘oh for gosh sakes we are doing the best we can!’ ”

Now, the finer points of “who-was being-what” are not on the table for discussions, just the clerk’s observable actions. The conversation is now properly focused.

What was specifically seen?

What was specifically heard?

Let’s manage from facts not opinions.