Managing poor employee performance in a business environment where expectations are high and staffing is tight can be a lesson in futility. As the new millennium rapidly approaches, you may be finding yourself dealing with a new breed of employee — one who is far more assertive, knowledgeable about their rights and more likely to make demands as to what they will and will not do. Further, with jobs in abundance in today's booming economy, those employees who push the envelope too far and eventually get canned know that their next job opportunity is just an application away.

Following is a list of 7 of the most frequent mistakes managers make when handling poor performers. I encourage you to ponder them, discuss them with your colleagues and, most importantly, heed the suggestions as to how to overcome them.

Many managers I've provided counsel to over the years are stuck in what I refer to as the "punitive paradigm" of handling poor performers. Their belief is that if you use a progressive disciplinary philosophy of three strikes and you're out, the bludgeoned employee will eventually leave. My experience over the years has been that employee who are approached in this manner will fight back, making it that much more difficult to come to a win-win resolution. Ideally, your goal in managing a poor performer should be to do whatever it takes to help the individual overcome his or her deficiency so that they can become a productive team member. While there are certainly exceptions to this rule of utilizing a corrective versus a punitive approach, what you'll typically find is your results will be much higher with a "four balls and you're on" versus a "strike three and you're out" philosophy.

This is called DENIAL. There are a fair number of managers who believe that poor performers will just mysteriously leave and their worries will cease. Managers sometimes believe that they will hurt an employee's feelings or damage them for life if they begin to discuss performance deficiencies with them. If you fall into this mindset, try again! The most important thing you can do as a manager is to help an employee come to his or her own conclusion as to whether to move forward with correcting the situation. Most "poor career performers" are willing to leave if you helped them understand that they are maybe not a proper fit for the work that they are doing. The fact that they are not working out doesn't make them a bad person. Rather, you are simply saying to the employee that they need to make a decision as to whether to turn the situation around or move on.

While labor and employment laws have their place for both employer and employee alike, most managers tend to over-exaggerate their importance when dealing with a poor performer. For years, I've had managers say to me "There is nothing we can do because the person is black . . . or the person is physically challenged ... or we're dealing with a woman over the age of 60" . . . and the list goes on and on. Often we use laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1991 as a cover or an excuse for not taking appropriate action. The message here is simple: When dealing with poor performers, do the right thing by them, do the best you can with them and treat them as you would want to be treated. Most importantly, recognize that employees sue because they perceive that they haven't been treated fairly, not necessarily because of some law that is protecting them.

Embracing the habit of "seeking to understand rather than to be understood" from Stephen Covey's best selling book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, can pay off huge rewards in handling a poor performer. Managers often refuse to provide an employee with ample opportunity to talk about their feelings because they somehow feel as though the employee will be getting the upper hand. The danger you face as a manager by not allowing the employee to open up is that you may be overlooking a critical piece of information that they've desired to share with you. Allowing a healthy two-way conversation provides the opportunity to add additional context to the issue(s) at hand, which may serve as a catalyst for moving forward with corrective measures.

The great Yogi Berra once remarked that, "If you don't know where you're going, then anyplace is fine." This certainly holds true for poor performers or any employees, for that matter, who don't have targets to shoot for. Many employees who have the potential to become peak performers often fail to get there because their job descriptions are not specific enough to reflect the level of performance you expect. It is important to realize in your managerial role the fact that, if you're unclear as to what the standards are and don't have a system to measure them, that you are putting your employees in a position to lose.

To this day, accounts continue to be told about the manager who wanders down to the human resources department seeking permission to fire a poor performer only to be told that the employee's last two performance reviews reflect a pattern of decent marks. Your role as a manager is to not only point out in the review patterns of deficiencies but most importantly to provide suggestions for improvement. One of the most practical steps you can take in this regard is to utilize what is commonly referred to as an unscheduled review to assess a poor performer's progress towards meeting expectations. These reviews are most effective when conducted every 2-4 weeks until the employee is up to standard. What this allows for is a paper trail documenting your efforts to correct the deficiency and serves as a foundation for further performance coaching.