Many of you have probably heard me talk about skill, will and ability in terms of evaluating an underperforming employee to determine what course of action to take.

If an employee doesn’t have the skill to do the job, we start with looking at their training or retraining. If an employee doesn’t have the ability – they have all the will in the world and they just can’t do it even after full and repeated training, then they need to be moved to a different job.

Then we come to will. This is a tricky one – when an employee doesn’t have the will to change their approach and improve in their job. This is the employee I want to talk a bit about today. The one who just doesn’t have the will to improve their performance or conduct. 

With this employee we often see their potential and strength. We know that they could grow to be a real contributor.  And therein lies a trap.  We spend lots of our time and attention on them hoping we can be the one to turn them around.  We think there’s something we can do to change them and then they’ll magically wake up and put it in gear.

Sometimes we trick ourselves into thinking that we are expecting too much and give them a little less to do to see if that helps. Or perhaps we get chummy thinking they’ll work harder because they like us. Or maybe we’ll just redistribute the work among the crew so they are just doing the things they like to do. Or maybe we’ll actually just do some of their work for them. 

This soft-pedalling just keeps things moving in the wrong direction and only serves to keep the erratic performance going. It also robs us of precious time that could be spent focusing on the majority of the crew who are actually doing their jobs just fine. 

From my experience, employees who are capable and have tons of potential yet lack the will to do a good job don’t actually know they are missing the mark because they have their own justifications, agenda of excuses, and reasons that make sense to them. And if we’ve been enabling them we’ve been creating a very ruinous situation.

So, here’s what I want to say.  We don’t have to change them, and we also don’t have to change things around to meet their personalized agenda.

What we can do is this.

We get with them and focus on facts, expectations, the gap between them and the negative impacts to the co-op and team.

We don’t have to wade in and try to change their mindsets; untangle their justifications and enlighten them to be different – we’re just going to get our time sucked-up with wishful thinking work-arounds.

As we start to rein things in, we’ll be hearing those strong internal agendas they have.  

Let’s not get distracted. Those are sidetracks to get attention away from the facts of their performance. This is a time for courage in our hearts, clarity, neutrality and grace. 

The point here is to be very aware when working with an employee that lacks the will to improve their behavior or performance.

The potential we see is usually never realized without their willingness and our willingness to effectively manage.

Let’s make sure we do our part, and we are willing.