How do you know if one of your employees is underperforming? And at what point does this become a real problem? Managers, supervisors, and business leaders must be able to intervene before employee performance issues hamper the success of their organizations.Performance problems in the workplace can be isolated incidents or symptoms of deeper patterns. It can be easy to miss these problems or to underestimate their impact. However, various indicators - such as employees missing deadlines or regularly being late for work - can alert you to possible performance issues and help you decide whether they constitute genuine performance problems.As a manager, you should have warning systems in place so you can detect potential performance problems early. If you avoid problems before they grow, you can prevent them from having serious consequences - for your organization and often for the employees involved.In this book, you'll learn how to detect a performance problem as early as possible. You'll find out how to identify genuine performance problems and the sources of information that can help you do this. You'll then find out how to determine a performance problem's nature and its seriousness. Finally, you'll learn how to accurately diagnose the causes of the problem, which is essential if you're to formulate an appropriate response.Telling employees that their work doesn't meet the required standards or that they're underperforming isn't an easy task. A direct report who's not performing well could be a friend or someone who's highly emotional, making the job even harder. Many managers and supervisors are tempted to avoid it, until it's too late to fix the problem.In this book, you'll learn about the benefits of handling minor to moderate performance problems early on, as they arise. You'll also learn how to identify an appropriate level of intervention, based on how pervasive or serious a performance problem is.Once you've identified the type of intervention that's called for to address a performance problem, you need to handle the issue appropriately. In this book, you'll learn about the sequence of steps you should follow to communicate performance issues to employees, with practical examples of how to do this sensitively and effectively. You'll also be given the opportunity to practice this type of communication yourself in a simulated situation.Finally, you'll learn about both fast fixes and long-term solutions to different types of performance problems.Ultimately, this book should help you improve employees' performance and morale, benefiting both them and your organization.Suppose you're the manager of an employee who's been arriving at work over 20 minutes late nearly every day. You've explained that this is a problem, but the employee continues arriving late. It's time to take action. If an employee continues failing to meet expectations, it's important to take decisive steps, rather than waiting for the problem to escalate further.If you don't take action in response to repeated performance problems, the problems are likely to become more entrenched.Failing to act may also undermine your authority, or make it appear to other employees that undesirable behavior is actually acceptable.Finally, if you don't act, it may be much harder to take necessary and more drastic action later. For example, the employee who always arrives 20 minutes late in the mornings begins to take longer lunches and sometimes fails to return to the office. He offers no explanation. If you have no records of the previous problems or of formal steps you took to address them, it may be hard to justify dismissing the employee.When a performance problem persists, what's required is progressive discipline. This approach involves imposing increasingly severe penalties on employees each time they fail to improve their performance, despite a manager's efforts to assist them.