Don’t ‘manage out’(sack/fire/dismiss/make redundant) an underperforming or poor behaving employee – repatriate them! Unless your system was seriously flawed when you defined the position, when you (or people you trusted with the assignment) proceeded through the recruitment process through to engagement, the performance reviews etc, at some stage this employee had been useful, maybe even good or great; and then some sort of rot set in!
There are numerous tasks in managing; some academic, some skill based, some emotionally based – the sum of these leading hopefully to Leadership behaviours and thinking. So, unless the system was flawed, the need is to reconnect with this employee and to examine your organisations human capital (I hate the term but here it serves a purpose)processes and policies. This problem is likely to be more about that failing than the actual employee.
Before you stop reading, outraged that this could even be seen as the case; up until now most of the energy could have been about judging down the employee and then agreeing with each other, consider the possibility that problems as seen, were not addressed effectively.
There are many assets in a business, capital assets – more and more this term is used in conjunction with people – people are certainly an asset – mechanical assets get serviced, preventative maintenance is scheduled and performed – in top organisations, they are recognised as expensive and revenue producing – well so are and do, people.
A piece of mechanical asset might become redundant and so will be replaced – up until now, they were not likely to be developing their own intellectual property – that was built into the newer version. People are constantly producing their own IP, learning from others and increasing their worth, except where they are not! That is where Leadership come in – recognising what people need to flourish and what demotivates; identifying the gap and developing plans to remedy – to reconnect – to repatriate.
People live up to or down to our expectations and that becomes self-fulfilling.
Anyone you or your team have marked as ‘not fitting your needs’ should be re-evaluated. Hire, train and expose to your team, expose to your clients, develop continuity and calm – this costs money and time – it is a serious investment. More still; taking someone from one position into your business is a move filled with the need for integrity – was there a proper process; is this the right job and the right person. My experience is that too often the actual job is the difficult situation needing re-examination. I would say 80% of the briefs I took when I owned a recruitment company were erroneous; that is the job needed to be redefined before the position descriptions could be imagined before the recruitment advertisement was formed before the candidates were analysed before the hiring decision was made. 80%!
The process of reviewing all of this is better left to an external person, someone who is not hampered with ‘how it has always been’, or ‘how the manager wants it done’. Performance management is one of the great opportunities of any organisation, one of the tasks so poorly carried out. This always needs to be reconsidered and should be before any further ‘firing or hiring’.