And -Poof- Goes the Weasel

Sometimes things go so badly for a manager that you just have to put some time between yourself and “that moment” before you can even think about it rationally. These are the sort of occasions when the horror of the situation seems almost impossibly comical in retrospect. Like the case of the disappearing employee.

I was in a new leadership role – the first time I had directly managed an all-right-brain function (not a technical department!) so I was a fish out of water. To make matters worse, we were filling a critical skill gap in the team and I needed someone who would provide some functional leadership over that area. We recruited hard and turned down many – until we found the “just right” person who seemed to make it worth the wait. Qualifications, attitude, team chemistry – it was all good. For about a week.

You see, this perfect person started picking fights with other departments right away, and by the end of the second week, I was in conference with the leader of another group, spending political capital to buy time for my new person to “adjust.” I explained all the problems away to a misunderstanding of whose-job-ends-where and a lack of training on our company procedures. These are not problems you face in technical jobs, I thought to myself.

Another week went by and the adjustments never came. Inter-departmental complaints got worse to the point where HR was involved, with two people threatening legal action against the company due to my employee’s arrogant bully behavior. At about that time, the other people on my team made it clear that the new person had none of the claimed job skills, so we not only had a rebel but an incompetent one.

What a mess! How could this happen to me, performance manager extraordinaire for hundreds of people in roles leading up to this one? Certainly there was some deception involved in the interview process but I would have spotted that in the first 90 seconds of interviewing someone for a technical role. But this was not a technical role. I had made my first big hiring decision in the new job, and it was wrong.

That’s when we got the rebel’s post-it note. It was stuck to a co-worker’s monitor, scribbled with something illegible except for the signature. Ever the diligent manager, I tried to call the employee’s cell but got no answer. Two more days, then the weekend, and no word or sign; – poof - gone.

If you’ve ever fired a really poor performer in a technical role, you have probably experienced the feeling of elation that comes over the team during the following days. Everyone is happy because “that” person is not around. Meetings go better because “that” person is not gumming up the works. The mood in the office lightens, and more work gets done. It’s an unmistakable signal telling you that you did the right thing. Well, five weeks into the new employee’s tenure, after two days absent with no word, I felt that elation in my small department.

Again, I was shocked. How could I have missed the fact that the whole team was working under so much tension and dread? How could I have noticed that people from other departments were avoiding us, but now they had decided to come back around again? Like Sinatra said, I picked myself up and got back in the race. I was bound to resolve the situation definitively and learn from it.

With some help from HR, we were able to come to the amicable conclusion of our employment relationship with the rebellious newcomer. That makes it sound too easy; the truth is that there was a lot of good work managing the emotions and egos involved. My team agreed unanimously to get the job done without putting anyone in the now-vacant role, which made me feel really stupid but very glad it was over.

So what were my cliff notes from this management use case? First, learn the actual job function of the department before you decide to hire anybody – regardless of what the prior manager or anyone else tells you. Second, no job is beyond testing; whatever people are going to be doing every day can be condensed into two hours and they can be asked to do it right in front of you before you make a hiring decision. Third, a take-charge attitude may be appealing in an interview but it’s only useful when the actual job requires it. Like Cesar Milan says about dog packs, misplaced alpha behavior is the root of a lot of unhappiness.

Thanks for reading this Management Use Case. I'm the co-author of a new book on software development leadership entitled You.next() that features dozens of other use cases for leadership. Please see more at www.youdotnext.com.