How to coach junior team members
What to do when team members are well-intentioned, but seem to make the same mistakes over and over.
You noticed a mistake. Again.
Sometimes, it’s the same mistake, over and over again – even though you’ve said something to the other person already.
What are you to do? Yes, you realize you have more junior team members…
But is there any way to help them level-up? And in a way that doesn’t drain your energy nor makes them feel belittled?
Yes and yes. I’m tackling this topic head first today.
Deciphering “junior”
First of all, let’s define who we’re talking about here.
What do we mean by “junior”?
Specifically, we’re talking about an employee who has a lack of experience. A lack of exposure and/or awareness to certain problems and contexts.
This doesn’t mean of course that they can’t gain that experience. It just means, right now, in this particular moment, they haven’t had that exposure or awareness.
This person hasn’t seen what you’ve seen yet.
This person hasn’t done what you’ve done yet.
So naturally, when you ask this person to solve a problem, it’s going to take them a little longer – and they will make mistakes.
As their leader, we want to find ways to help support them to ease the learning curve and reduce their error rate.
Reconciling experience with expectations
This means that if we are trying to help our junior employees, we have to acknowledge this lack of experience.
And, we have to also acknowledge the reality of our expectations.
If you were to visualize both, it’s likely that the experience level of your junior employees are lower than the level of your expectations:
For example, your expectations might be that your direct report manage the budget for a client project.
But the employee might not have ever previously managed a budget before. They don’t have that experience. So their experience is lower than that the expectations you have for that role.
Because of this, the only way you can have your expectations met by your junior employee is to reconcile their experience with your expectations.
You have to either increase the person’s experience, or adjust the expectations.
Or do both.
Let’s talk about how to do this…
How do you increase experience?
Here are a few ways that you can increase the experience level of your junior employees:
Shadowing other team members - Have your junior employee be an observer to other team members who are already fluent in the desired task/area. In the example of the employee never having previously managed a budget, this might be adding your junior employee to the project management account where other budgets are being managed so they can watch the entire process end-to-end.
Practicing in a low stakes environment or pilot - Ask your junior employee to build their skills by rolling out smaller versions of the same task, or in a low stakes environment. This is particularly helpful for helping your employee build confidence in their skills, so they don’t have to perform them cold.
Direct teaching by you or another peer or mentor - You can also directly share instruction for the task or skill area that you want your junior employee to improve in. Of course, depending on your own bandwidth as a leader, you may want to ask another senior individual contributor to perhaps take on this role.
External education and training - Provide the person with a book list, and/or budget or recommendations take a course in the area you’d like them to be upskilled in.
How do you adjust expectations?
Sometimes, you can try to build your junior employee’s experience all you can – and it will still fall short of your expectations.
In this case, you’ll need to adjust your expectations in a way that still enables the success of a project. Here are a few ways you can do this….
Ask yourself: “How much room for error do I have on this?” You might realize you have more flexibility than you realize: That your room for error is generous, and that it’s okay if this project is more of a learning opportunity for your junior employee. Or, you might realize that you don’t have that much room for error, and might need to reassign the project to someone else all together, because of how mission-critical the exactness of execution is.
Ask yourself: “What could I change about our expectations so that the overall integrity of the project remains intact?” Consider what happens if you change the level of quality required, the speed of the project, or the overall scope of the project… At what level would the overall integrity of what you’re trying to accomplish suffer? And at what level would things still be okay? Feel encouraged to push against your perfectionist tendencies that the work your junior employee gets done must be 100% as good as if you were to do it. 70% is good enough.
Ask your junior team member: “What feels most realistic and least realistic about these expectations?” Get input from your junior employee about what they see as the hardest, most challenging parts of the project. You’ll gain greater insight then into how you might adjust the project scope and expectations accordingly.
Ask your junior team member: “If we changed [insert your recommendation for changing expectations], would you feel more set up for success?” When you have a good sense of what might make sense to adjust (e.g., deadline, breadth of project), ask this question to your direct report. Notice their reaction. Do they seem grateful and motivated? Or, do they seem reluctant to agree with you? You’ll only increase the likelihood of success for the project if your direct report feels like they can be successful. Ask this question to find out.
One last alternative option
As a quick recap so far: If you have a junior team member and you want their performance to improve, recognize that you need to either find a way to:
(A) Increase their experience.
(B) Adjust your expectations.
(C) Or do both.
However, you might find that you have already tried to increase their experience as much as possible. Or perhaps the nature of the task makes it very difficult to increase their experience especially in a short amount of time.
You might also find that you cannot adjust your expectations to be any lower without risking real failure of the project.
In this case, know there is a fourth option:
(D) Decide to part ways. This could be reassigning the person, or letting them go.
This is of course the most gut-wrenching option. And it often feels like we’ve failed and let the other person down, when we see this option on the table.
However, if you’ve tried A or B or C – you are only left with D. And choosing to have an honest, respectful conversation about how this role was not the right fit for both of you will only serve you both well in the long run.
Your junior employee doesn’t want to be struggling forever. If it’s not the right fit, they’ll be relieved that you’re giving them a graceful path toward a place where they can be more successful.
(If you do need to let someone go, please do take advantage of our module in Canopy on How to Fire Someone with Grace, Dignity, and Respect.)
Break the loop
Coaching a junior employee doesn’t have to feel like a mind-numbing, repetitive loop. Where you’re going round and round, giving the same feedback over and over, with no change in behavior.
You can break the loop. Remember you have two levers to do this:
Experience and expectations.
Adjust one (or both) accordingly, and you can begin to help your junior employees start to become not-so-junior anymore.
-Claire
P.S. For further learning on how to coach both high performers and underperformers, we have an in-depth module on How to Coach an Employee that you can access here in Canopy. I highly recommend checking it out if you’re wanting to dive deeper ✨