The Growing Challenge of Terminating Underperforming Employees
Working with excellent colleagues is energising; managing poor performers is not. Incompetence, gaming, and legal barriers make dismissal costly, harming high performers. Strong performance management demands clarity, documentation, and strategic discipline to protect organisational integrity.
Over the years I have been fortunate to work with some truly wonderful people. In addition to being consummate professionals, they have often had a great sense of humour — an essential ingredient to combat with the inevitable tedium of work. If humour be the food of work, laugh on!
Interwoven with these great people have been others of mind-numbing incompetence. Their output has ranged from so bizarre that if it was not problematic it would be funny, to people who are an outright organisational liability.
On the bizarrely funny end of the spectrum was a former colleague who was employed as a System Administrator (technically my team lead at the time though not my line manager). They asked me how to finalise the nightly back up process using the LTO tape system. Once I had shown them the process, they then proceeded to put the tape in the lockbox to send off site. I said, "you should label that before sending it off". To which they asked, "how do I do that?" I replied, "by writing on the tape's label." Holding up a pen, they asked "should I use this pen to do that?" They were let go a week later as this was merely the tip of the iceberg.On the bizarrely funny end of the spectrum was a former colleague who was employed as a System Administrator (technically my team lead at the time though not my line manager). They asked me how to finalise the nightly back up process using the LTO tape system. Once I had shown them the process, they then proceeded to put the tape in the lockbox to send off site. I said, "you should label that before sending it off". To which they asked, "how do I do that?" I replied, "by writing on the tape's label." Holding up a pen, they asked "should I use this pen to do that?" They were let go a week later as this was merely the tip of the iceberg.
Of course, if you raise this in certain circles you will get the witty retort "you should have done a better job of hiring!" Such Captain Obvious commentary is of little help, and infuriating when you are not the hiring manager, only the long suffering person who must deal with the daily fallout. It also fails to apprehend that hiring is an arms race in which poor performers are constantly seeking to game the system. An ingenuity which would be better spent developing the capabilities to perform their job well, but which instead sees them one step ahead of the hapless hiring process — a process made all the harder by AI and remote interviews. This is why I always advocate there is nothing like an on site closed book exam to sort the capable from the 'faking it until they are rumbled' brigade.
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The remedy for a shortage of judgement is not a course in judgement. It is to rebuild the conditions in which judgement is exercised—and to pay the political price of doing so.
Someone is promoted, moved sideways in a restructure, or hired in on the strength of a document. Within a quarter the gap is obvious and a fortnight's certification is bought to close it. The evidence says the first move was made on the wrong signal and the second is the weakest remedy available.
A certificate records that a person completed a defined process on a defined day. It does not record whether judgement was formed — and in most organisations, nobody is asking the second question, because the first one has tidied the file.
The person who takes on eight things and ruins all eight is following a specification, not indulging a personality. Organisations grow the arms themselves, because busyness is legible and judgement is not.
The remedy has no dashboard, vests over years, and mostly benefits your successor—which is precisely why it is avoided. The final essay in the Prior Obligations series sets out what raising the general level of competence actually requires, and why no tool can be bought in its place.
I can audit a model's output on leadership and must take its tax advice on faith. That asymmetry is the whole problem, and it is not psychological. The third essay in the Prior Obligations series argues that AI does not deskill the competent—it unmasks the fake.
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