Correctional Officers – Leaving the high performers alone

Are you one of those correctional officers that are being directed or guided by someone who spends very little time on the floor with you or comes to your control center and tells you how to do your job better based on proficiency tips and hand me down suggestions?  The truth is most supervisors spent 20 per cent of their time with those that work for them while the officer spends 80 per cent of the time doing what they are supposed to do according to post orders and other directions. Surprisingly they do their jobs with a minimal amount of complications and report only those problems that require a supervisor’s knowledge.

Thus it might be accurate to say that some supervisors spent most of their time dealing or managing or documenting their time with underachievers or underperformers, employee evaluations, babysitting those that need help all the time and investigating those incidents that occur under their watch. Needless to say, they are appreciative of those A team players on their team and the ones they can count on to do their job and often go above and beyond the line of duty to accomplish what needs to be done and do it well. In the course of reducing staff and multitasking these individuals are easy and low maintenance to take care of as they don’t require any babysitting or micro managing that is very time consuming thus allowing the supervisor to “leave them alone”

Logical thinking would drive you to think that these high performers are the ones rewarded and looked at as assets to the team and organization giving them praise and rewards. Wrong, these are the same persons that work longer and harder than the low performers and are tasked at a rate of twice what the lazy ones do without any incentives or praise. It is no wonder that these type of behaviors by supervisors and managers drives the good ones away and create low morale situations in the workplace.

Unfortunately managers and supervisors in the corrections field feel that when they leave those that perform well alone they are doing them a favor and reward them by neglect. There are no compliments coming their way and it’s often too late to reverse this lack of appreciation as they walk out the door looking for another place to work. Thereby in an unintentional manner, they drive the high performing officers away.

The second thing bosses do is give these high performers the toughest job assignments there are on shift as they feel confident these individuals can handle the most challenging situations there is. Sadly, these competent and energized persons will also be asked to clean up after others that have failed to do the job adequately and often a main source for a supervisor to get them to catch up or complete tasks that were assigned to others on the shift but who failed to pull their own weight.

The next realization is that high performers are treated different that low performers when it comes to disciplinary or evaluation sessions. Supervisors often place unrealistic expectations on these high output workers and put a tremendous amount of pressure on them to not have a bad day, make a mistake or miss a deadline. This in turn makes them abused to the sense they are charged to work long hours, and fundamentally driven to achieve more to meet high expectations that can often lead to burnout or high stress situations.

Last but most importantly, high performers left alone suffer from the opportunities to be identified for special assignments and rarely chosen for higher challenging duties as they are the core of the team’s success. Although it is natural for these type of workers to excel and improve, they are often overlooked to learn new things and chosen as mentors or training officers that could lead to better career opportunities for them along the way. The eventual result of such neglect is a high use of sick leave, splitting their vacation time and eventually excessive absences from the workplace in order use a mental health break to recuperate from their abuse.