My Problem Employee

I wrote this all down over a year ago, and it's been sitting in my list of drafts since then. The situation has resolved itself, and this is no longer my problem. Re-reading it now, parts of it seem whiny and I considered just trashing it. But I thought someone else who has had to manage an incompetent employee might commiserate. This was a deep source of frustration in my life for a year and a half, and I was looking for something written by someone dealing with the same challenge. I'll share in case someone in a similar position finds this useful.

I also tie this to Bryan Caplan's book The Case Against Education. In order to explain why education has such strong signaling value, he has to be able to explain why employers don't just hire indiscriminately and fire the poor performers. I wrote about that here. I have a much finer appreciation for Caplan's discussion of firing aversion. I also can appreciate why "employer learning" is so slow; this is the process by which employers figure out their employees' productivity. HR departments sometimes actively censor or purge this information.

Anyway, I'll start with the gossipy details about my under-performing employee.
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I had a problem employee who was not competent at his job. I’d given him two major projects that he was supposed to work on semi-autonomously. The pace of the work was incredibly slow, and it often came back done incorrectly. It wasn't to my specifications, so I'd say so and ask for it again, sometimes pointing to the documentation where I specified what  I wanted, such as a prior e-mail or project plan. I could have easily done both projects and had them done sooner and to my specifications when he wasn't even halfway done. I often had to reached into his project with a heavy hand, going so far as to give him working code that finished his job. He often declined to use what I’d given him, having failed to understand the code, and went back to tinkering with whatever half-completed code he was working on.

A huge part of the problem was lack of communication on his part. I would discuss his projects with him in person, but my critiques and suggestions for different directions did not make it into his work product. I confirmed fairly late in the game that my comments were utterly failing to register with him. He basically came out and admitted this was true. He just would not open up and say “I’m confused about what you want. Explain it to me again.” Or “I don’t understand how this discussion affects my projects. Can you clarify?” We have regular group meetings in which I will discuss topics and code strategies directly relevant to his work. I would point out the relevance to his project, then follow up in an e-mail pointing out the relevance and even pointing him to the relevant lines of already-well-commented-code. Despite basically handing him the answer on a silver platter, this stuff still would not make it into his work product, and his work would come back wrong (also late).

All this came to a head when he “confronted” me about my management style. I had been sending him almost-daily e-mails asking him to correct his work. I would ask why stuff had been missed. Was he just being forgetful? Was he deciding to do something differently from what I specified? I needed to know so I could fix the problem. He was declining to answer such questions, because he obviously didn’t care for them. (Another related long-standing pattern: he declines to volunteer any information, even relevant information, like “I’m confused and need more direction.” He declined to answer a pretty direct question in front of my boss in a meeting until pressed multiple times. It was embarrassing. I pointed it out to my boss after the meeting and said this was a pattern.)

He tried to blame the issues on me, which I thought crossed a line. He said that the sheer volume of "details" being thrown at him was too much for one man. (It was not; there was so much spoon-feeding and repetition that it should have been easy for him.) It was apparently unrealistic of me to expect that all of those details would be remembered or make their way into his work product. One of my recommendations that had set him off was to write down better notes and organize them. He had a habit of not taking any notes at all. I think his philosophy must have been "If it's important it'll come up again" or "If it's important, I'll remember it." If his problem is his own poor memory, better note-taking is the obvious solution. I have a pretty damned good memory, but I still miss things. I take notes when my boss or my boss's boss are commenting on my work product. So does every other productive employee. It's basic office-work hygiene. He’d balked at this and other suggestions, suggesting that my style was too controlling and saying that no other manager had ever exerted this level of control over his work. According to him, he’d never had bosses send back so much of his work for corrections. (I now have private knowledge that this isn’t true, having discussed him with a previous manager who'd had the same frustrations.) He even told me a cute story from when he had, in the past, managed a fast food place. When he tried to crack down on his staff and enforce certain standards, many of them promptly quit on him. I tried very careful just to let him talk without interrupting. Why stop a man when he’s offering to hang himself like that? But sarcastic comments presented themselves. (“This isn’t a Burger King.” Or “I really liked the end of your story, where the bad employees all quit. I wonder if that solved their problem.” Of course I did not say any of these things.) The message was loud and clear. His poor performance was not his fault, it was mine. It was a result of my being too demanding and attentive to detail. He also said repeatedly that he’d never had performance issues with other managers, which I knew wasn’t true. I wasn’t about to tell him that I knew what previous managers had said about his work, but it was useful to know how poorly his self-assessment was calibrated to reality.

After letting him go on for a while, I said that letting up on attention to detail was not an option for me, and that, yes, he would have to fix his problem of dropping instructions. Taking notes would help. Once again, he balked at this suggestion. (Gee, if only there were some way to augment my fallible human memory. Alas, there isn’t!) But more fundamentally he didn’t understand the technical and theoretical details of the tasks he’s doing. So instructions, even when they are pretty clear, failed to register with him. What he perceived as “a bunch of details” were actually crucial things that can make his work product unusable if not implemented correctly. Missing them revealed a basic lack of understanding. He was un-self-critical, apparently incapable of doing a mea culpa. He couldn’t simply admit error and try to fix his problems.

I did some questioning after this meeting, and it turns out the problem employee had persistent performance issues with pretty much every manager he'd worked for. He’d been passed around at this company for something like ten years, from one manager to the next. I don’t know why my boss accepted him on the team, or why it was up to me to say this guy is incompetent and needs to go. Maybe it’s because this is the first time he’s worked for someone who is more technically competent and “down in the weeds” than he is. I can reach into his work, spot his math or coding errors, point out conceptual errors, get his work started for him, etc. I’m about the least confrontational guy around, but I finally had enough. It was taking so much time to correct his work and document his poor performance. Plus it was hugely stressful. I was having trouble sleeping at night, sometimes for days, dreading having to have another unpleasant conversation.

All this had me thinking about Bryan Caplan’s review of the “firing aversion” literature. In The Case Against Education, Caplan has a long discussion of why college degrees affect your pay for such a long time. Couldn't employers simply hire indiscriminately (less discriminantly, anyway), then keep the good performers and fire the bad ones? Couldn't they spot employees whose credentials overstate their productivity and demote or fire them? And shouldn't this make credentialing pretty useless? It turns out there is a literature on this topic, called "employer learning." It actually takes quite a long time for employers to figure out how productive their employees really are. Like, years or decades, not weeks or months. People can "fake it" for a while, or put in extra effort and look more productive temporarily when the boss is getting suspicious. Besides, even when there's no doubt about someone's poor productivity (as is the case with my problem employee), managers are often reluctant to fire out of sympathy. (In my particular case, my sympathy had run out long before the problem was resolved.)

Even when managers are willing to fire, Human Resource departments are often hard blocks on doing the obvious thing. "Do you have documentation? Oh, you do! But, sorry, you didn't document it through our HR system, so it doesn't count. Let's put the problem employee on a 'performance improvement plan.'" From HR's perspective, a termination is a potential lawsuit. They want to do everything they can to make the problem employees quit of their own volition. They also want to make sure it's not just a problem of an incompetent manager making a bad call or failing to manage the problem on their own turf. This is very frustrating to deal with. Putting someone on a performance improvement plan is a pretty direct way of saying, "You aren't qualified for your job." You have to do this, then face that person day in and day out, and this humiliating HR ritual is hanging over both of your heads every time you converse with your employee. In his book, Caplan says something about how even slackers can temporarily look busy and conscientious when under temporary scrutiny. ("Look busy! The boss is watching!") Problematic employees "graduate" from the performance improvement plan, and from HR's perspective the problem is solved and the slate is clean. In reality, the underlying problem is still lurking under the surface and likely to reemerge. And managers are reluctant to go through this emotionally draining process.

Following HR's process is especially tricky for a job like mine. We aren't making widgets here. Employee competence are things like "Does the employee understand the statistical concepts necessary to do the work?" Or "Was the statistical analysis done to the outlined specifications?" Sometimes mistakes creep in to statistics work that are hard to define ahead of time as a "not-do." You're just supposed to know that something looks odd, using your judgement, and locate and fix the problem. It would be easy if I could simply say, "Produce X widgets per week or you're not qualified." In an environment where productivity is hard (impossible really) to measure and even harder to define ahead of time, it's very difficult to implement HR's performance improvement plan. And I don't relish the idea of constantly being questioned, "How am I doing? Do I make the cut?"

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Some people seem to believe businesses have absolute mastery over their employees and engage in cut-throat employment practices. If this were the case, there wouldn't be so much hesitation over canning poor performers. Caplan's story holds up pretty well. Businesses are often paralyzed by the fear of wrongful termination suits or poor morale that result from performance-based firings. Firings and layoffs still happen, it's just that companies are sometimes too hesitant to do the obvious thing. A combination of human psychology (bad performance evaluations are very unpleasant on both sides of the conversation) and bad HR policy creates a lot of friction. People really do get locked into roles they aren't qualified for, sometimes for a decade or more.