Where did Turnaround Interview come from?
From George Raine
Founder of Montana HR Services and creator of Turnaround Interview™:
Back around 1987, I was the human resources and labour relations manager for a division of a large steel company in Hamilton, Ontario.
Shortly before lunch one day, an employee came to see me — let’s call him Charlie. After nearly 30 with the company, Charlie was approaching retirement age. He asked whether he could get an estimate of what his pension would be if he retired that year compared to if he worked until his normal retirement age about 18 months later. So, I told Charlie “no problem” and to come see me at the end of his shift and I’d have the numbers ready for him.
While getting Charlie’s pension estimate prepared, I retrieved his employee file to check whether he had any lengthy absences that might affect his amount of pensionable service. When I opened Charlie’s file, I was surprised to find more than 20 disciplinary warning letters over the course of his career. Every one of them was for some very minor quality error. Every one of them contained a warning that future errors could result in “more severe disciplinary consequences, up to and including dismissal.”
So, more than 20 times, the company had told Charlie that it could foresee firing him if he did not change his ways. More than 20 times, Charlie must have considered whether he should appeal his discipline – in his case, through a formal grievance procedure. But despite all the warnings of more severe discipline, the company had simply reissued the lowest level of warning possible.
Was it any surprise that employees did not take discipline seriously? Was it any surprise that there was a militant faction amongst the employee population?
Most troubling of all was the fact that Charlie had a reputation as one of the most hard-working, honest, and reliable employees in the whole organization.
The aha! moment
The company supervisors were a decent group. They responded to problem behaviours in fundamentally good employees by either ignoring the issues or throwing low-level disciplinary warnings into the file. Discipline, after all, was the only tool the employer had provided managers with for correcting behavioural or performance concerns. There was no other option that had the employer’s express approval.
This was the “aha” moment – the first stirring of an idea that would become Turnaround Interview™.
The evolution
Turnaround Interview™ evolved over a number of years. It combined learning from many sources:
• readings in psychology and therapeutic counselling
• experience in direct and cross-examination during administrative hearings
• experience and study in negotiations
• experience and study in progressive and humane investigative questioning techniques used by experts in law enforcement and intelligence.
Out of this grew a systematic approach to a non-confrontational conversation between a manager and an employee who has demonstrated a negative-but-persistent workplace behaviour — a conversation resulting in the employee making a genuine commitment to concrete actions that will bring about needed change.
The central idea was to use pride as a motivator rather than the fear of punishment. Pride is the most powerful motivator available.
In Turnaround Interview™, we end the conversation in such a way that the employee will feel pride if they live up to their commitment and will want to avoid the disappointment that would go along with failing to do so.