Lots of my clients are using ‘connect and coach,’ a replacement for the traditional, cumbersome performance reviews that we both hate to give and to receive.
A typical coaching time often sounds something like this:
“George, I really appreciate your work in shipping. You are organized and conscientious and people like you around here, BUT you are coming in late too often, and that needs to stop.”
Here’s the interesting thing – whenever you insert BUT into the sentence, the person tends not to hear anything you said before BUT. The BUT disqualifies any good things that you said. BUT kills and negates everything else, and makes it hard for the person to take your constructive criticism as anything but a serious failure on their part.
A quick and simple way to fix that is to replace the word BUT with AND. Your new, better way sounds something like this:
“Johnny, I really appreciate your work in shipping. You are organized and conscientious and people like you around here, AND I have also noticed that you are coming in late quite often, and I need that part to stop.”
Using AND allows that person to see your comments as a whole and give you a much better chance of correcting the behaviour without crushing the person.
Try this in your coach and connects and you`ll see it works.