Hi, everybody. I’m Mike Staver. This is Mondays with Mike, a weekly video series where I answer questions from people just like you. Here’s this week’s question.
“I hired an employee 90 days ago, they had the right experience and were the right fit. They are still the right fit, but man are they failing at their job? We have provided training. We’ve provided coaching. We’ve provided mentoring. While they’re making an effort and they’re making a significant effort, they’re failing miserably. How do you deal with a great fit that’s a failure?”
Well, I think you need to evaluate the specific area where they’re a failure. Evaluate the specific degree to which they are failing, reevaluate your coaching. What did you say? Coaching, training, mentoring and make certain it is on point. Then the last thing I would do is I would sit down with them and watch them do the work.
I know this is painful, but sit down with them and spend an hour or two not by five minutes literally watching them do the work and if they cannot do the work even after all that, they got to go. That’s what the 90 day probationary period is for. It’s hard because they’re great. The only other suggestion I have is that there’s another job that you think they’d be good at move them into that. Sometimes we can move them into a lesser, responsible job. When I was in college, I worked at it was a store called the Wild West stores. I don’t think they’re in business anymore, but it’s a jeans, shirt, shoes store. I worked in the shoe department and then I worked in the men’s pants clothing department. They wanted me to do the books and I was terrible at it.
I messed it up so bad. I did the weekend books. It was horrible. I was so bad and thankfully they didn’t fire me. They just moved me back to shoes and made me an assistant manager eventually and kept me away from the money. To this day, when I think about right now, I’m feeling some anxiety because I was so bad, but my boss was smart. She was really smart. She moved me into a different job because I just was failing at that job, but I was a fit and I was competent in other areas and so they leveraged my competent in other areas. Sometimes that’s the best thing you can do, but if not and there’s no place for them and they just can’t do the job. It’s time to move them on tough. Hope that was helpful.
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