Six Professional Ways to say 'This Sucks'

SOURCE

I shamelessly stole this from DamnitAll . She shares all sorts of fun and useful links with me.

Six Professional Ways to say 'This Sucks'​

So, how do you tell someone their work just isn't cutting it? For those of us in management or leadership positions, there are a variety of situations where you need to redirect or correct an employee's activities or critique their deliverables. In a world of often apathetic 9-to-5ers, it's how leaders crack the whip. It's easy to give genuine praise to someone that goes above and beyond. The real challenge, as far as I see it, is how to tell an employee that they aren't doing what you need them to do and figure out how to fix that through a tactful you-suck-please-get-better conversation.

Anyway, here's the list from the link:

The cool part about working in a blue (er, brown) collar job that involves sucking human feces through a hose into the back of a truck is that you can be pretty blunt with your employees about their performance. "What the fuck is this?" is a line that is all too commonly used to suggest that something somewhere is lacking, but that obviously isn't how much of the world deals with said shortcomings. I've also had to troubleshoot employees by figuring out the root cause of the performance deficiency (technical ineptitude, conflict with other coworkers, inadequate resources, doesn't feel appreciated by management, occupied with family problems back home, complete lack of professional motivation, etc.)

For those of you that work in fields where people have egos and feelings, how do you deal with this situation?

How do you tell someone they suck or their work sucks in a professional manner?

I want stories of you telling someone they suck. I want stories of your boss telling you that you suck.

Okay, TFP... commence the sucking.

 

I work from home, so there is very little face to face talking to people. Therefore, when I'm telling someone what a shitty job they are doing/did it is usually by email.

I've come to the conclusion that you should write your expletive laden email, go and have a cup of coffee, then come back to edit it into 'management speak'.

Mine usually end up going to a group of people, and rather pointing the figure at someone in particular, I try to use it as a lesson to be learnt, along the lines of "when doing x you should think about doing y". Pretty boring mostly.

There have been one or two occasions where the unadulterated expletive laden rant has been sent.

 

In case of temporary employee: at the end of their stint you give them excellent testimonial, so they easily can find assignment elsewhere and won't be your problem again.

 

I've always found "Are you fucking kidding me?!" to be a good motivator for my team.

 

The people I deal with are students.

Unless the work done is totally off-track, I elicit what qualities are needed to rectify the bad bits, then I present detailed appreciation of those good bits in which the needed qualities are prevalent or at least present. I then address the bad bits as the 'few remaining elements' which require no more than extension of what's already being done well.

It is similar to the "We're not quite there yet", and goes like "We're nearly there, you only need to continue what you've already proved you can do well, to tidy up what's left."

In the best case, it is part of an iterative process to tease out and address underlying problems while keeping focus locked on to the desired product; in the worst case, it provides a paper-trail of positive support as back-up for fair dismissal.

 

Happened to me once. Spent a whole week writing an appeal for a losing case. My professor/supervising attorney takes one look at it and says, "I liked the first one better." So much for all the work. I just copied and pasted our earlier letter and made a few adjustments. Also added another small section.

Regardless, it was disheartening to work under her as I always received loser cases and rarely received constructive feedback.

 

Just heard this about our organization president: if you show him something and it doesn't hook him right away, you'll be able to tell by him repeatedly saying, "This is really good work. You've done a lot of good work on this. You've worked really hard. It's really good work. Good job."

I guess it helps to be able to read between the lines. I'm sure I'll have this to look forward to when my team meets with him later this week.

 

I'm not very good at this part of my job. I am trying hard to take a calm, positively reinforcing approach to correcting my staff. My emotions can take over quite easily and things can get (and have gotten) very ugly. My current approach is to show the offender where the mistake was made, explain the correct approach, and get away before I tell him what a dumb fuck I think he is.

 

This is different from what we talked about. Why have you gone in this direction? Convince me to go with your vision.

btw wtf??

 

I usually try to point out the error in very straight forward terms, with no hint of emotion.
Then point them in the direction you want them to go.
Then follow up a day or two later, reinforce the message, ask if they have further questions.

 

I give them the reminder that "Quality" comes before "Quantity" in our mission statement. It's pretty much the only way I'm permitted to say something sucks (that's my boss' job). Unless I'm letting my boss know that someone or something sucks. In which case, we're pretty informal and I'll just straight up tell him that something sucks.

 

Same as fflowley.