It’s normal to underperform on occasion. After all, everyone has a bad quarter — or even a bad year — from time to time. But don’t just sit back and wait for that painful performance review. Be proactive in talking with your manager about missing your goals. In situations like these, the two best ways to preserve your professional reputation is to first, come clean about your underperformance before your boss has a chance to discover it another way, and second, to focus on solutions, not excuses. So, schedule a conversation with your manager in which you take full responsibility for your mistakes. Express contrition and remorse. A sincere “I’m sorry,” goes a long way. Then, explain how you plan to do better. Focus on correction, not blaming, shaming, or faultfinding. As you offer your ideas and suggestions, ask your boss for advice and guidance.
Here are some ways to think about — and prepare for — the discussion:
Principles to Remember
Do:
- Try to figure out the source of the problem by engaging in some soul-searching.
- Offer ideas on how to improve the situation and ask your manager for guidance.
- Resist any overly optimistic impulses. It’s not worth trying to put a positive spin on your underperformance.
Don’t:
- Wing it. Prepare what you’ll say and think about how your boss will react.
- Mince words. Begin the conversation with “I have some bad news for you.” This ensures no mixed messages.
- Ignore red flags. If you’re struggling, it might mean that you need more frequent check-ins with your boss, more development, or a job change.
Case Study #1: Admit your mistakes and generate ideas on how to improve
Matt Lee works at ResumeGo, a resume writing service company. Matt joined the company in 2016 and has consistently been a strong performer — until he recently found himself in an unexpected slump. The company offers money back guarantees for clients who are not satisfied with its products, and a little over 10% of his clients had asked for refunds. “This was the highest percentage of unsatisfied clients I’d ever had,” he says. “I had to explain it to my boss.”
First, he thought about the source of the problem. “A lot of the issues stemmed from a lack of communication with my clients,” he says.
In looking back, he noted that several of his clients said they didn’t like the formatting of their new resume. “I realized that if I had simply showed them the format I was going to use beforehand and explained the reasoning behind why I chose that format, this [trouble] could have been avoided.”
Second, he thought about how his boss would react and prepared what he was going to say. “More refunds requested by customers ultimately means less revenue for the company, so I was definitely nervous [to talk to my boss],” he says.
Matt began the conversation by “openly acknowledging” that there was a problem. “I wanted my supervisor to know that I was very serious about finding ways to improve my performance.”
Matt says he didn’t want to come across as defensive in trying to justify his poor performance, but he also wanted to make sure his manager understood his perspective. “While I acknowledged that there were things I could have done differently, I also defended the specific decisions I made with regards to how I wrote each resume,” he says. “I’m the expert here when it comes to how to write and design resumes, so I can’t simply alter my standards every time a client disagrees with how I approach their resume.”
Ultimately his boss agreed with many of Matt’s points. “It’s important with these kinds of issues to stand your ground and justify your actions — especially when you are confident in the decisions that you made.”
Matt ended the conversation with ideas on how to improve. “I had a list of things I could do that would potentially increase my customer satisfaction numbers,” he says. “These mainly revolved around communicating with clients more extensively at the very start before making certain decisions about their resumes.”
Since the conversation with his boss, Matt has worked on his communication with clients, and his customer satisfaction numbers have improved as a result. “I think that particular quarter was likely just an outlier,” he says.
Case Study #2: Work together with your boss to improve your performance
Each January, Tracy Nguyen, an online media relations associate at Tiny Pulse, a Seattle-based startup that provides technology to assess employee morale, sits down with her boss to outline her goals for the coming year.
This way I am always able to track my performance,” she says. “As many PR practitioners, my main responsibility is managing brand reputation through generating positive media coverage. Last May, I did not meet a monthly goal of securing seven unique instances of press coverage.”
She reflected on the reasons for her missed goal. “I sat back and looked at all of my approach methods to see what was working, what was not, and what needed to be improved.”
She figured out that her long pitch needed work. “It was not getting the attention of my target journalists,” she says.
Second, she did a lot of research on how to improve her pitching. She also sought advice from her peers on how she could get better at it. Then she prepared what she would say to her boss.
When it came time for the meeting, she told her boss that she missed her objective. She apologized for falling below expectations but then launched into a discussion of what she would do to improve. “I wanted to bring this to my manager’s attention instead of waiting to be asked about what holds me back,” she says. “I was determined to lead with possible solutions.”
Tracy also asked her boss for suggestions on how to enhance her pitching skills. “Together, we came up with a solution to try an 80/20 method, which means spending 80% of the time targeting middle-tier publications and 20% on top-tier ones,” she says.
To measure the effectiveness of this method, they compared the impact of the new practice to the previous one. “As a result, two months later I exceeded my goal,” she says.