CONTEXT :

About 10 months ago you received promotion to a supervisory position. It was an internal appointment and you were promoted ahead of two of your peers. One of them has taken the decision well and you still have a good working relationship with them. The other has become very remote and difficult to work with.

They do no more than is necessary, and performance levels in their section have dropped since your appointment. You have heard from one of the other employees that the person takes every chance to criticise you and your decisions and they have turned a number of employees against you. The drop in performance is affecting the productivity levels within the organisation. You have made a couple of tentative approaches to this person to discuss the issues, but they are very non-committal and say that you are 'imagining all this rubbish'.

You have received written statements, volunteered by two staff, identifying instances where this person has been critical of you and one instance where they overrode an instruction given by youalthough this was a fairly minor incident. You have promised not to disclose the identity of the people involved, and this means you have to be very careful about how you use the statements, because the section is quite small (eight people).

Your manager has noticed that relationships appear to be strained in this section and has asked you to address the performance issues and to report back on the results.

You will need to conduct a formal performance evaluation and counselling session in order to address the problem.

QUESTIONS :

Establish a report for your manager outlining:

• at least five steps you will take, with detailed reasons for your choice of actions
• the identity of any other person/s who should be involved; explain why and when they should be involved
• at least three actions you could take, and why you will take those actions, to follow up the counselling session
• how you will monitor the success of your counselling and performance assessment actions
• an explanation of at least two actions you will take if the counselling is not successful (with detailed reasons)