New Supervisor with Poor Employees–Tip of the Week

You’re a new supervisor.  Maybe you’ve been brought in from outside the company.  Maybe you’ve been promoted from within.  In any event, you’re now in charge of a department, and you supervise the employees in that department.

You work hard to get to know your employees.  You assess their performance as quickly as possible.  You provide coaching and let them know you want to help.  You let them know what you expect.  You encourage them to come to you with problems and questions.

After some reasonable period of time, you conclude that you have two, maybe three, employees who are poor performers.  You’ve watched.  You’ve coached.  You’ve listened.  These employees are somewhere between mediocre and terrible.  You check their personnel files, and surprise, surprise, you find good performance reviews–maybe a lot of them.  How is that possible?  Perhaps the former supervisor was lenient or lazy or non-confrontational or too good a buddy with the employees.  Are you now stuck with them?  No.

Meet with each of them individually.  Explain what you think about their performance as firmly, yet courteously, as possible.  Tell them you’ve reviewed their personnel files and don’t understand how they received the performance reviews in their files.  Listen to what they have to say.  Then tell them that their performance has to change–soon.  You’ll work with them.  You’ll give them extra attention so they’ll have every opportunity to improve.  If necessary, you’ll use the progressive discipline system to deal with their performance if it continues to be unacceptable.  You’ll give them honest reviews.  You hope it doesn’t come to this, but if they can’t or won’t change their performance, they will no longer be employed by the company.

The process you begin should be done in full consultation with human resources.  An HR representative should be with you when you have the conversations discussed above.  As you walk through the minefield you’ve inherited, you do so hand in hand with HR.   Together, you talk about how things are going, work on documentation, make sure you’re following company policy, and make decisions.  If you’re lucky, performance will improve enough.  Chances are, however, an employee will end up being fired, and you may get sued.  In fact, if an employee is in one of the protected classes, he or she may accuse you of discrimination right after you’ve had the first conversation with the employee about his job performance.   That will make the minefield even more dangerous as you proceed with progressive discipline (if necessary) and then with termination. 

But you’ve got to do it.  Regardless of the mistakes of the past, you have to be accountable for the work of the employees you supervise.  You need to make sure that you’re dealing with the employees you’ve identified as poor performers the same way you’re dealing with other employees.  You may decide you were wrong about one of the employees you thought was a poor performer.  You may decide  someone you initially thought was doing a good job isn’t.  You need to be consistent.  After a bit of rough going, you’ll earn the respect of your employees, and your department will function as it should.  You can’t be held hostage by performance reviews that should have never been given in the first place.  Good luck.