Connection Before Correction: Enhancing Growth Through Relational Engagement

How do you handle difficult people? How do you hold people accountable? What do you do with underperformers? I’ve heard a lot of these and related questions over my 25-year career. And it’s not just me people ask them of! You can type in those questions and be bombarded with answers to the “7 steps to do this” and “The 5 hacks to do that”. If only it were that simple!

Connection Before Correction

This was in my inbox the other day:

“Your name has been mentioned a number of times in our organization since you spoke for us. Yesterday, I was with a VP who told me that he had been having a hard time with one of his leaders. The person had done something that made him want to blow up and discipline the person. He said: “Then I heard Sarah’s voice say connection before correction.” I asked him what he did. He said he asked how the guy was, and it turns out he wasn’t okay at all. Not at all. Correction wouldn’t have fixed the problem because this guy was really hurting. So we got him some support.”

I love it when what I say becomes an earworm. (If only it had the same superpowers when I mention house cleaning and ensuring dishes make it into the dishwasher!)

More importantly, I love it when folks remember the deeper message. Sure, folks hire me to speak about recognition, but they get a crash course in meaningful human connection and how to give people what they need most.

Have you ever met someone who didn’t need to know that they mattered to someone else? I haven’t.?

Connection before correction.

In other words, you haven’t earned the right to correct if you haven’t connected with someone.?

If you do it anyway, you won’t be any further ahead. Imagine if this VP?had gone headlong down the correction path; he would have missed the painful?root issue hiding in plain sight. The root issue of what looks like a performance problem might be a personal issue, process problem, overwork, stress, compassion fatigue, poor training, and more. There are many reasons why we need folks to course correct, but what if we rule out the other reasons before we assume the worst in them?

There aren’t many people who wake up in the morning and say, “I am going to do a really bad job today.”

Your Time and Your Ear: Recognition In Action

The VP ended up spending two hours with the leader. You might be thinking, two hours! Who has two hours?! But this person, a model employee and department manager for twenty years who never took up anyone’s time and never called in sick, was due his two hours with “the boss.” Sometimes, you have to take the time.

And time = recognition.

Here’s the other reality: The VP could have wasted time in that first interaction. He could have reacted and demanded a correction. Heck, he was probably right that the performance wasn’t adequate!?

I have repeatedly seen something important about how performance issues suck time: If you come down hard on someone hurting in the name of efficiency, it will cost you even more time (not to mention the relationship) in the long run. That two hours (and more) would be stolen from him in the repeated attempts to correct, maybe future meetings with HR, a performance plan, and more. And does any of that sound positive, productive or performance-elevating?

Taking time and asking, “Are you okay? You don’t seem like yourself” are forms of recognition. You can’t spend your whole day doing this. Still, if a high-performing person is behaving out of character and failing to meet expectations suddenly, you can take an educated guess that something is behind it, and only some of the time, it’s their “fault.”?Particularly for folks who have?built up “performance equity,” give the benefit of the doubt first; by working together to course correct, hopefully, the formal correction won’t be necessary, and connection will be amplified in the process.

The Human Side of Work

Humans are complex, and their lives can be messy. As the saying goes, things are not always as they seem.

Are you curious about my reply to my former audience member?

“Kudos to both of you for creating the opportunity for that leader to know that you value him as a person, and not just as long as he’s productive, and only worthy if his performance is career achievement level! I think people leaders underestimate all the time just how much they make a powerful and positive imprint on the entire career trajectory of someone’s life; there are sliding door moments where somebody can imprint the experience in someone’s memory. This might have been your sliding door moment with him. Elevating someone from their ‘unresourceful’ ashes and not letting them smoulder in pain is something people will never forget. I suspect when your manager gets through this rough patch, he’ll come out the other side more likely to connect and less likely to jump to correct because he knows what it feels like. Keep recognizing! FROG on!”

What do you think? Can you remember people you’ve reported to you who believed the best in you? Can you remember those that you felt you could never do anything right? Who did you work harder for? Your answer is reason enough to adopt, if you haven’t already, “connection before correction.”

Here are more ideas for creating a meaningful connection:

• Bridging the Divide: Creating Connection in Our Workplaces Today
• Kind People Finish First: Building Stronger Cultures Through Connection
• Recognition in Training: Creating Brave Spaces for Learning, Connection and Psychological Safety

Disclaimer/Humble Brag Moment: 100% of this content was human-generated (by us folks here at Greatness Magnified). We are committed to authorship integrity and will inform you what percent, if any, is AI-generated.