What is Performance Counseling? Features, Objectives, Conditions for Effectiveness

What is Performance Counseling?

Performance counseling can be defined as the help provided by a manager to his subordinate in analyzing their performance and other job behaviors in order to increase their job effectiveness. Performance counseling essentially focuses on the analysis of performance on the job, and identification of training needs for further improvement.

Performance counseling is basically given by the manager to an employee exhibiting poor performance. Mostly, counseling sessions take place when an employee fails to improve his performance even after receiving an informal notification or advice about the same.

Performance Counseling is a very important activity that helps employees to know themselves better. Performance Counseling refers to the help provided by a manager to his subordinates in objectively analyzing their performance.

It attempts to help the employee in:

• Understanding himself – his strengths and weaknesses.
• Improving his professional and interpersonal competence by giving him feedback about his behavior.
• Setting goals and formulating action plans for further improvement.

Features of Performance Counseling

Some of the features of Performance Counseling are:

• Conditions for effective counseling: Counseling cannot be effective if the subordinate does not trust his boss. It is necessary that the subordinate should feel free to participate without fear or inhibition as it is a dialogue between supervisor and subordinate and hence should be a two way communication. The main purpose of counseling is employee development. ‰
  
  
• Performance Counseling Phases:
  
  
  • Rapport Building: In the rapport building phase, a good counselor attempts to establish a climate of acceptance, warmth, support, openness and mutuality. This phase involves generating confidence in the employee to open up frankly, share his perceptions, problems, concerns, feelings etc. The subordinate must be made to feel wanted and that his superior is genuinely interested in his development.
    
    
  • Exploration: In this phase, the counselor should attempt to help the employee understand and appreciate his strengths and weaknesses. He should also understand his own situation, problems and needs. Questions should be asked which help the employee focus on his problem.
    
    
  • Action Planning: Counseling interviews should end with specific plans of action for development of the employee. The main contribution of the superior in this phase is in helping the employee think of alternative ways of dealing with a problem.
    
    
    Finally the superior may render some assistance in helping the employee implement the agreed upon action plan. Often good counseling sessions fail to produce effective results due to lack of follow

Objectives of Counseling

The following are the objectives of Counseling:

• Helping him to realize his potential as a manager.
  
  
• Helping him to understand himself – his strengths and weakness
  
  
• Providing him an opportunity to acquire more insight into his behaviors and analyze the dynamics of such behaviors.
  
  
• Helping him to have better understanding of the environment.
  
  
• Increasing his personal and interpersonal effectiveness by giving him feedback about his behaviors and assisting him in analyzing his interpersonal competence.
  
  
• Encouraging him to set goals for further improvement. ‰

Conditions for Effective Performance Counselling

Conditions for effective performance counseling may be listed as follows:

• A climate of mutual trust, confidence, and openness needs to be ensured at the outset. ‰ Climate should be such that it can ensure subordinates’ free participation in the review process and also in their giving the correct feedback. This is important, as counselling is not a one-way process of communication, rather a two-way traffic.
  
  
• The focus of performance counselling is on employee development.
  
  
• Employee development should not be considered isolated from other issues of performance appraisal, i.e., remuneration and rewards, promotion, motivation, etc.