You may feel that you are doing what your organization expects from you, if you selected this response. You are quite competent at coaching a supervisor to become more effective and maintaining employee confidentiality while solving his problem. You are a good problem solver, with a great deal of practice. There are, however, several problems with this approach.
Predominantly, you are missing an opportunity to build the capability of both a supervisor and an employee to talk together and solve a problem. You are also “mind reading.” While you may make the employee feel good about his work, you have no idea how the supervisor really feels about the employee and his work. You don’t even know if there is a problem to solve after hearing from only one person. Deciding the situation is a training need is premature.
Finally, promising the employee confidentiality would not be an issue if you were to consider approaching this situation differently. I recommend that HR professionals explain to staff that you are not a repository for information. You would not be effective in your HR role if you could not use information provided by employees to impact and improve your organization.
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responses to the other options. Please select a different response.
