My worst employee ever: Competent and smart, but bad at the job

Your employee just doesn’t seem to grasp the job. When do you intervene?

Source:  Protocol

By:  Allison Levisky

Date: March 23, 2022

It was the late 1980s. Andrea Brice was 28 and a first-time manager while completing her engineering degree. When I asked her recently about the worst employee she’d ever had — or at least one who had posed a significant management challenge — she remembered a data-entry clerk immediately.

“Perfectly nice young woman who was competent, smart, but not good at her job,” said Brice, now the founder and chief data officer of the data intelligence startup Willowfinch. “[Sometimes] you know somebody is not good, and they’re never going to get good no matter how much training you can give them, because it just doesn’t resonate.”

After a year and a half, it was clear the employee’s performance wasn’t going to improve. She hadn’t committed a fireable offense, so Brice didn’t fire her, but when the clerk expressed frustration about the demands of her job, Brice encouraged her to find a new one.

“She was the one who was like, ‘Andrea, this is so stressful. I can’t,’ and I’m like, ‘But this is the job, so you know what — I will give you a happy recommendation,’” Brice said.

That conversation wasn’t the hard part for Brice: The clerk was more interested in her music, anyway, and ended up going in a different direction with her career. The tough part was helping the clerk realize that she wasn’t happy with her job, Brice said.

When is it time to intervene?

If an employee isn’t performing, how long should you give them to improve? Now, with decades of experience under her belt, Brice is a “firm believer in 90 days.” But it’s not always so simple, said Deb Muller, founder and CEO of the employee relations software maker HR Acuity.

“It really depends on the size and the scope of the role,” Muller said. “Does the role have [a] tremendous impact where you might not have as long to make a decision, because the impact of them not doing their job is tremendous?”

In this case, the stakes were low enough that Brice was able to put up with the underperformance for a year and a half. But that was likely a year and a half of Brice spending extra time managing her, Muller said.

“In retrospect, I would bet that when [Brice] looks back, she thinks about the time she had to spend on it, all the re-work she had to spend on it as well,” Muller said.

Don’t just watch them struggle

An underperformer can negatively affect other team members’ performance: Someone who’s unable to do their job can block peers from doing their own. Colleagues will notice that an underperformer isn’t pulling their weight, which can strain a culture and demotivate teammates, Muller said.

And by the time the clerk came forward, she likely had been unhappy in her job for a long time. That may be a sign that an earlier intervention was in order.

“It’s not fun to not be successful at work,” Muller said. “Many times as a manager, you think you’re doing the person a favor by really prolonging the inevitable. In most cases, you’re not.”

As a manager, it can be hard to give negative feedback or put an employee on a performance improvement plan, Muller said, but it’s better than watching them struggle and pretending everything is OK.

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