“If any of these situations sounds familiar – and you have tried to correct the situation by directly confronting it – it may be time to let that person go.”
Every so often you may find that you have an unmanageable employee. These people share one (or more) of the following characteristics:
- They accept corrective feedback, seemingly willingly, and then immediately return to the behavior that created the need for that feedback in the first place. It is as if they don’t learn.
- They are passive/aggressive. They deliberately do things to set up other people for failure by playing dumb and not doing what they know should be done to accomplish the task at-hand.
- They say negative things about the company or their manager, and encourage other people around them to do the wrong thing, or work less or care less than they should, because “the man” is somehow mistreating them (and most everyone else).
- They create quality problems – either ones that have been solved before, or new ones from doing unanticipated things because they are so off the wall.
If any of these situations sounds familiar – and you have tried to correct the situation by directly confronting it – it may be time to let that person go. They may have been a loyal employee and it’s never easy, but the reality has clearly evidenced itself. They aren’t going to change. Just consider them as firing themselves. Were it not for their unacceptable behavior, they’d still have a job with you!
Mark Zweig is Zweig Group’s chairman and founder. Contact him at mzweig@zweiggroup.com.
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