Dear Madeleine,

I recently hired a new member for my team. She was great in the many rounds of interviews, seemed to have the skills we needed, and was unanimously the first choice of the hiring committee.

She is now about six weeks in, and I keep waiting to see the person I met in the interviews.

She has not completed any of her onboarding training. When I look in our LMS, she seems to have made it through only about 40% of some of the required modules. I have had to show her several times how our Teams site is set up (she was used to the Google Docs system), and she keeps asking questions that she would know the answers to if she had looked at the different files I have assigned to her. I can see in people’s files the last time they were opened, and she has only opened about a quarter of what I expected.

It’s like she can’t remember anything we talk about from one day to the next.

I asked her to submit a short report on all the calls she is attending with her teammates so that I can keep track of what she is picking up. She submitted one short report and then nothing. (I should have at least fifteen by now.) We meet every other day and I have brought this up several times. She assures me she is working on them. I know she has plenty of free time but I have no idea what she is doing with it.

I’m so confused. I don’t want to come down on her like a ton of bricks, but I need to get to the bottom of what is going on. I think I may have made a terrible mistake. What should I do?

Terrible Mistake

____________________________________________________________________________

Dear Terrible Mistake,

Oh dear. I am sorry. It is so strange when people come across one way all through the interview process, and then turn out to be not at all what you were led to expect.

The only thing to do is tackle this head on. Share with your newbie what you expected compared to what she has managed to accomplish and ask her what is going on. The question is: “What has gotten in the way of your being able to meet these expectations in the past six weeks? Is it too much work? Is it lack of clarity? Is there something you need from me that you aren’t getting?”

She will either be honest and tell you, or she won’t. If she does, then you’ll know what you are dealing with. Much as I hate to speculate, it might help you to prepare for different scenarios.

• If something totally unexpected has happened, she might need help to arrange for a short-term leave.
• If it turns out she has no idea how to prioritize all of the tasks, you might offer to break down the tasks you expect to see completed day by day.
• If she is feeling so behind now that she has become paralyzed, you might re-negotiate her deliverables and offer a fresh start.
• If she is second-guessing her own interpretation of what a good job looks like, you can offer more clarity. Your newbie may very well need a list of what you expect laid out as daily tasks until she finds her footing.

It would be smart to involve your HR business partner if you have one. If your newbie has a learning difference and needs extra time or help, there may be provisions for that. If she is dealing with an unforeseen challenge, she may need to take some time to deal with it.

She may decline to tell you the truth about what is going on and try to head you off with more promises to catch up, so you should be prepared to not accept that. The key is for you to tell the truth as kindly as possible, without judgment or blame. It might sound something like: “Look, let’s not worry about catching up. I’m okay with letting go of the reports I asked for—those were to help you keep track of what you are learning. But I do need to see x, y, z by the end of the week. Is that something you think you can commit to?”

You will also want to be prepared to share the potential consequences if it becomes clear that she is not able to do the job the way it needs to be done. Maybe you won’t have to share those just yet; but if she commits to something you think is eminently doable and then doesn’t come through, you may have to at that time.

It sounds like you have been patient. It also sounds like she may think she can fly under the radar with substandard work. It is time to get the cards out on the table—to be clear that you are paying attention but also that you are invested in helping her succeed. But for you to help, you have to understand what is going on.

Being direct and telling the truth can be challenging, but it doesn’t have to mean “coming down on her like a ton of bricks,” It just means—well, being direct and telling the truth. Not doing that won’t serve either of you. If she is ultimately not capable of doing the job, keeping things in limbo will just make things worse.

Be kind. Be respectful. Be truthful.

Give her step-by-step instructions if you both agree it will help. Give her an out if there doesn’t seem to any help for it.

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

Dear Madeleine,

I read last week’s column with interest and it sparked a question for me.

I am hiring right now for a position that requires someone to simply keep their head down and get the job done. Our company isn’t growing very fast, so there won’t be much room for advancement.

I have a number of good applicants—some young people who clearly want to grow and some middle-aged folks who seem happy to get into a swim lane and stay in it.

My boss is advocating for me to focus on the younger, ambitious ones, but I think that is just setting people up for frustration. I think it makes more sense to hire someone who will not be disappointed with the lack of a career path.

What do you think?

Race Horse or Work Horse?

________________

Dear Race Horse or Work Horse?

This is such an interesting question! I suspect your instincts must be based on experience. I would ask what caused the last person in this job to leave. If it was because there was no room to grow, then you have your answer, don’t you?

The fact is that companies need workers who enjoy their work, are content leaving their work at work at the end of day, maybe go the extra mile on occasion (but not all the time), and aren’t gunning for their boss’s job. After all, there is only so much room at the top.

The last thing you want is someone who will be disappointed; you are right about that. I think you want to focus on finding someone who has the right skills, will be a good fit for your culture, and fully understands the nature of job and its lack of potential for growth. I think it has more to do with life goals, hopes, and dreams than age.

It sounds like you have a good grasp of the kind of person you are looking for. The age thing is a red herring that muddled the issue.

Trust your gut on this one.

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

Dear Madeleine,

Your advice has been very helpful in the past, so I couldn’t stop myself from writing to you again about a tricky situation.

I have recently taken over the area of learning and development as part of my portfolio. With that came the discussion of a resource with my boss. My boss suggested a name (K) from HR ops team who is interested in L&D.

K is more of a generalist who coordinates internal events and manages onboarding. I talked to K’s current boss. There are some transferable skills but there will be a huge learning curve (like instructional design, empathetic written communication skills, critical thinking) and I am open to invest my time in growing them (K’s preferred pronoun).

From where I sit, I have always viewed K as someone with a fixed mindset in their partnership with my team and someone I would not have hired myself. Also, in my last year and a half, they have never called me by name or even started a written communication by simply saying hello. That being said, we are on respectful terms but have zero interpersonal connection. 

Last week I learned K has big hesitation in reporting to me. I can only guess it is because I had to make some needed changes when I built my team and, in doing so, I parted ways with two of K’s professional friends. With my current team of 12, I am a strong and empathetic manager with a 100% score on my feedback survey. 

I am still confident that if hiring from scratch I would not have hired K. I have a deep understanding of what good looks like for the role and team culture. 

With the organizational changes, if K accepts the job, I am stuck with her. If she doesn’t, I can go outside the org to hire. I am trying to gain insight into my biases and to put my preconceived notions aside to manage K and help them grow, but it is a weird start of relationship when there’s a team member who doesn’t want to report to you. I worry about my current healthy team culture getting disturbed.

What advice do you have for me?

Uncertain 

______________________________________________________________________________

Dear Uncertain,

Thanks for the kind words and the trust you are placing in me. I really appreciate it.

When Jim Collins’ Good to Great came out in 2001, I remember thinking how smart, simple, and obvious his advice was to have the right people in the right seats on the bus. What took me a long time to understand is just how tricky that can be. Simple, yes, but not easy. What Collins failed to mention was that his advice also means is getting the wrong people out of seats they are already in and navigating organizational demands to hire from within. The strategy is sound, but the execution requires excellent hiring skills and the freedom to hire as you see fit—not to mention an available talent pool!

Assuming you have the hiring skills, the other two requirements might leave you stuck with K.

So now what?

Congratulations on your efforts to be aware of your own biases; that is a great place to start.

I would caution you against judging a person’s character based on email transactions. Many people aren’t warm and fuzzy over email. Possibly K is not comfortable making strong connections through media and needs to build trust one on one in person. It sounds like you are senior to K, so you never know—it’s possible they think it is appropriate to maintain strong professionalism because of that. You just won’t know until you get a chance to meet in person (even if it is over Zoom).

Your other misgivings are fair, though. And you must honor your own impressions and instincts.

I think your only option is to have the super candid conversation with them. In this conversation you need to assess a couple of things:

1. What are the reasons behind K’s hesitation about reporting to you—and can they be overcome?
2. Will K be ready and willing to give you a chance?
3. Does K really want the job, and why?
4. Is K prepared to throw themselves at the learning curve ahead?

To prepare for each of those topics, you will want to find the sweet spot between Candor and Curiosity. You can check out our Conversational Capacity model here.

The author, Craig Webber, says you should be ready to:

• State your clear position
• Explain the underlying thinking that informs your position
• Test your perspective
• Inquire into the perspective of others

It might sound something like this: “I understand you may have a hesitation about reporting to me and I would like to know more about that. I think it is critical that we get off on the right foot and be able to build trust together. What do you think?”

Or

“What makes you interested in the job? What is it specifically that you hope to learn? How will it be different from the job you are doing, and what makes it attractive to you?”

Or

“If you were to step into the job, the learning curve will be quite steep. Are you prepared to withstand the discomfort of being in learning mode for a while?”

You will want to mostly stick with questions while avoiding “why” questions which tend to put people on the defensive. Your candor and insistence that K be candid with you will tell you everything you need to know about whether or not bringing K onto your team will be a disaster. And if you really think that will be the case, you need to be prepared to tell them that you don’t think they are a good fit for the job. You must have the courage to tell the truth, even if it means taking some time to think about it after the conversation.

Hopefully, if you do that, it will discourage K enough to keep them from taking the job and it will free you up to hire a more appropriate candidate. Of course, if you do that and K still takes the job, you will have to start off with another candid conversation.

On the upside, you may clear up some misunderstandings on both sides and find that the job is just the change K is looking for and they are right for your team. Wouldn’t that be grand?

But taking the leap without the heart-to-heart is non-negotiable. You will so regret it if you don’t.

You have clearly worked very hard to build a high performing team. You must honor your instinct to protect that hard-won accomplishment.

Be kind and tell the truth. Ask the hard questions. If that scares K away, so be it.

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

Dear Madeleine,

I have an amazing team except for one person. I’ve provided ample opportunities for this person to step up and she just isn’t picking up on them. I can’t tell what is going on. She seems bright enough. She can work hard—I’ve seen it—so I don’t think it is laziness.

Also, I’m about to hire a few more people and am wondering how to avoid hiring someone like her.

Exasperated

Dear Exasperated,

I have always said that a manager must not be more interested in an employee’s development than the employee is. And that may be the case here—but let’s check it out first.

The first order of business is to have a conversation with your person in which you explain your point of view. This is going to require you to be direct but kind. It is entirely possible that she hasn’t picked up on opportunities because she was waiting for explicit direction from you. Not everyone picks up on cues, especially if they are implied versus direct.

Be more directive and provide more touchpoints regarding her professional growth. The key here is for you to properly communicate and partner with your employee so that you understand her hopes and dreams and can allow her to drive her own development. Give this a serious try for at least a couple of months. You might feel as if you are micromanaging, but in some cases that’s what people need.

What if, after you have tried this approach, your employee still doesn’t show any ambition? One option may be to change her title to technical specialist or something similar and just stop worrying about her career path. Lots of organizations are filled with people who are perfectly happy to stay right in their lane without much growth or change—but in some organizations, the trajectory is “up or out.” If you know you’ve really given it a shot, and it just doesn’t seem to be in the cards, then you can decide what to do about it.

Now about your prospective hires. It sounds like you are looking for some key traits in your candidates. Research supports the idea that job seekers with the following four attributes are predicted to have significantly higher levels of success in any new job.

1. Work attitude
2. A sense of accountability
3. Prior related job success
4. Culture fit

Work attitude can be described as a positive disposition or attitude toward work that persists across employment experiences. Candidates who demonstrate high degrees of work attitude:

• will go out of their way to describe negative experiences in the positive,
• find it hard to describe negative situations without sharing how the situation made them stronger, and
• have a deep need to work hard and produce results that make them proud.

A sense of accountability means the extent to which a person believes they have control over their own outcomes—also called locus of control. Candidates who demonstrate a high sense of accountability:

• are 40% more likely to succeed in any role,
• believe in themselves, and
• will stand up under pressure and refuse to play the victim.

Prior related job success—the degree to which the candidate has met formal goals in past jobs that are similar to the job at hand. This is, of course, the most obvious factor and the one hiring managers pay the most attention to. It is important, but not the only important thing.

• Candidates who have achieved success in prior jobs, athletics, academics, or other meaningful pursuits are significantly more likely to succeed.
• Both success and failure become habits throughout a career.

Culture fit is the degree to which the candidate shares similar values with the organization and demonstrates an authentic interest in the job at hand. In this case, you clearly are creating the culture in your group and you need to hire people who will fit your standards for ambition and desire to develop.

• Effective hiring processes attract candidates who have similar values and repel candidates who do not.
• It is imperative for interviews and testing in the hiring process to identify honest, hardworking, and positive candidates.

You are going to want to do behavioral interviewing to find out an applicant’s history and assess for these four traits. For an in-depth guide on behavioral interviewing, look here.

Ideally, you have HR professionals who can help you with this. If not, you will be on your own to do your own crash course in hiring! In my experience, hiring is 90% of the battle when it comes to getting the right people in the right jobs. Everything else is tweaking the details.

Good luck on both challenges!

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

Dear Madeleine,

I work for a great manager at a nonprofit. My manager is wildly committed, super passionate, and really seems to care about his employees. I have reported to him for seven years, during which time I have gone from being known as a green kid right out of college to an old hand who knows how to get things done around here.

My problem is that my manager is terrible at hiring. Terrible. He keeps hiring people that were vetoed by everyone else on the team. He falls in love with candidates for obscure reasons, such as he likes their foreign accent or their backpack (true story—it was covered with travel stickers showing third world countries the guy had worked in, which is relevant to our mission, but still).

Our last three hires have been disasters, and I saw it coming each time. All three were gone quickly but our team is tired of the time and energy it takes to onboard these people as well as the disruption to our day-to-day work.

I have been researching different hiring practices and I think I could add a lot of value by making our process more effective so we make better hires. How do I go to my manager and offer my help without him getting defensive or seeing it as insubordination?

Only Want to Help

Dear Only Want to Help,

I can only assume your organization doesn’t have a competent HR person to support hiring—if it doesn’t, you do seem to be on your own. Hiring is so often treated as an afterthought and not considered to be as critical as it is. The best employees are the people with the right experience, the right skills, a solid fit with the values of the organization, and a love of work. The best employees are almost always good hires to begin with. There are a lot of ways to assess potential candidates and thereby raise the quality of new hires.

If you do, in fact, have someone in HR, you may want to start there so you aren’t stepping on any toes.

Either way, I think it is fair to say that you should talk to your boss. You have worked together for too long not to be honest about the toll the errors are taking and how you might be able to add value. I am laughing a little because all of my regular readers know exactly what I am going to say: talk to your manager and ask for permission to offer some thoughts.

The good news is that the mistakes were rectified quickly. The only worse thing than a bad hire is not recognizing it and fixing it fast. The best way to avoid big mistakes, other than hiring well, is to impose a three- to six-month probationary period before going to a full employment contract. You’d think people would be on their best behavior for the required time period, but my experience is that people are pretty much are themselves from the outset.

Even so, the cost of a wrong hire is high. So, as you prepare to talk to your manager, consider how he prefers to process information. He might respond well to a narrative—the emotional decision based on a backpack might be a clue. You describe him as super passionate and caring, so possibly an approach based on appealing to his emotions may be the way to go. Or perhaps if he is an analytical thinker and uses data (just not when hiring!) he will be persuaded by facts and figures. If he seems to be a systems thinker, you can go at the problem using information about how each system in the organization is affected by the disruption and how much more smoothly things would go with proper hiring decision making protocols in place.

Listen to your manager’s speech—the way he talks will be your tipoff. Use language he tends to use and thought patterns that will feel familiar to him. Ask for permission to share your thoughts and be ready with a brief, condensed version of your argument and your approach. Start with the big picture and the headlines and get him interested. Once he is interested, you can go ahead with your detailed outline. You can be ready with a presentation to give right in the meeting or to send to him afterward.

Your use of the word insubordination was a bit of a surprise, as there is less hierarchy these days than ever before. Perhaps your boss has strong control needs? If so, three bad hires in a row must really hurt. I think the only thing that would be insubordinate would be doing something behind his back or gossiping about his lack of competence in hiring. Trying to add value by doing research and making recommendations based on accepted best practices seems reasonable to me. Show respect and be polite and kind. Pay close attention to how what you are saying is being received and stay attuned to when you should stop and try again later. You should be okay. Your heart is in the right place.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

I manage a large team of accountants and other kinds of finance experts. We recently posted a job for a senior budget analyst.

One of the applicants is a person who was in the finance department a couple of years back. I wasn’t his boss, but I wasn’t impressed with him then and I am not impressed with him now. He wasn’t a team player, he was loud and obnoxious, he complained about the workload, and he left the group suddenly.

I am dead set against rehiring this person. But my boss, the CFO of our company, remembers him fondly and thinks it would shorten ramp-up time to hire someone who knows the organization. I think we can do much better.

How do I make my argument without sounding like a jerk? It’s also possible that this guy is a friend of the boss and I would run the risk of hurting myself politically.

Taking a Stand

Dear Taking a Stand,

Adding a new hire is always a risk to a high-functioning team, so you are right to be concerned. One bad apple can indeed spoil the barrel, as Adam Grant shares in his recent research. Hiring may be the most important part: some people are good at it but sometimes it is just sheer luck to get it right. One of the consultants we work with to get job fit exactly right, Phil Olsen, told us you must answer three critical questions when hiring:

1. Can they do the job the way we want it done (or better)?
2. Will they love us?
3. Will we love them?

I would also suggest you take an analytical approach to solving this problem. Lean on HR to design the exact competencies and experience required for the job. Include the importance of attitude and work ethic in your job design—this should easily exclude the candidate you are allergic to. You won’t be a jerk—it’s just a matter of fact. (If you don’t have that expertise in house, I’d suggest you contact Phil. His method is phenomenal.)

If you are stepping onto political thin ice, I guess you will find out if your boss insists on hiring the ex-employee despite the data showing what a mistake it would be. It seems, though, that if you get your ducks in row and can intelligently make your case, you will be fine.

Finally, the best argument against a weak candidate is to find an ideal one—so the faster you can do that, the better off you will be. Good luck!

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!