Have you ever heard this response when you talk to one of your employees about their below standards work performance?
“I don’t know how to do that because you didn’t fully train me. How was I supposed to know?” or,
“I’m just confused. There is a lot I still don’t get that you guys have not explained!”
This is a tough one to handle because it’s a double whammy – an excuse and an accusation all rolled into one.
Hard to keep steady when this is coming at you.
What we don’t want to do at this moment is get all defensive and start the “I’m the boss, you have to see it my way” battle, or start hem-hawing around getting all defensive and trying to explain all the things we did for them.
This “you didn’t train me right” coming from an employee can sometimes mean retraining is in order or unique considerations. Yet many times what we are facing is an employee’s deflecting the conversation with a sidetrack to avoid taking responsibility.
If we know we’ve provided reasonable orientation, training and resources, provided accommodations if needed, and the employee is insistent on their confusion, we need to keep the conversation on track toward expectations. We let them know that part of our expectation is that they are able to understand and perform to standards given the information and training they have already received.
Also, we have an expectation that if there is something they don’t understand, they know how to get some clarification and are proactive at doing so.  
Basically, we need to let our employees know that we expect them to be a moving party in their growth, development, and functionality in their job. i.e. not performing up to standards is one problem and not getting help or clarification on a work task is an additional problem.

In short, we expect them to “own” their job.
For some employees we will need to coach and clarify that self-responsibility is part of their job description.