How to Manage Incompetent Employees – 4 Essential Steps to Take Today
Incompetent employees cause a lot of problems in the team. Other team members resent carrying poor employees and resent their impact on the team’s performance and status. What impacts the team overall indirectly impacts everyone in the team.
If you don’t take action to improve an incompetent employee, you are sending a message to the team that poor performance is okay. Trying to improve team performance in this situation is nearly impossible. With less opportunity for good team performance, the appeal of moving teams for the higher performers increases, which further damages team performance.
How to Manage Incompetent Employees – 4 Essential Steps to Take Today
- Understanding what is behind the incompetence
- Assessing the potential
- When transferring is the answer
- How to fairly remove them from the team
what is an incompetent employee
In my view, an incompetent team member is a person that performs at least 20-30% below the average of their peers doing the same or similar jobs. i.e. there is a really noticeable gap in performance levels.
There are lots of employees that fall into this category on a temporary basis for all sorts of reasons. Temporary is not incompetence and usually much easier to fix. Incompetence is when employees perform well below peers, over the longer term, and they are unable or unwilling to learn and improve.
With incompetent employees, getting one of three main outcomes – improve, move or removal – is a must. Go through these 4 steps to learn how to get the best result for you and your team when faced with an incompetent team member.
Watch on YouTube
Listen on Podcast
understand what is behind the incompetence – The first step for how to manage incompetent employees
When taking over a new team, invest time to find out the reasons for what appears to be incompetence in any team member.
Incompetence can develop in established team members because the business is growing or changing quickly or becomes more complicated and individuals aren’t able to keep growing and improving fast enough.
From experience, the four main reasons team members significantly underperform are:
- They don’t understand what is expected from them
- Don’t believe they are performing poorly
- Don’t want to do a good job and be a team player.
- They don’t have the skills to be better
Good management can – a lot of the time – quickly improve individual performance by addressing each of these reasons.
Incompetence comes from not having the skills to do the job that is required of them, which includes the ability to learn fast enough.
Make the time to understand what is behind the incompetence. You massively increase your chances of getting improvement and make it a lot easier and quicker to choose the best course of action.
assess the potential – The second step for how to manage incompetent employees
Incompetence from a person who is keen to learn, has high energy and is ambitious – feels very different compared to facing incompetence in a person who is lazy, not interested in learning and who doesn’t like change.
The first has a lot more potential than the second. Your time, energy and effort is precious.
The will and attitude of the incompetent person is a huge factor in deciding what actions are sensible to take as a manager. The more the team member is willing to learn and is able to learn quickly, plus the more potential they have to get to a good standard, the more willing I would be as a manager to invest the time and effort to help them improve.
Always ask yourself “Are they demonstrating:
- A will to learn and improve?
- The ability to learn and improve?
There is loads you can do to help a person improve. Options include:
- Setting really clear expectations and explaining exactly the steps they need to take to improve
- Providing mentoring and coaching from yourself or others in the business
- Put them on internal or external courses
- Get them self-learning – i.e. give them a reading list, video list etc and request they put the effort in to learn from them
If they don’t have potential to improve, then you have two main options left.
When transferring is the answer – The third step for how to manage incompetent employees
It takes a lot of time, effort and cost to hire new people into the business. There is also a risk that you hire poor or unsuitable individuals. Therefore, it makes a lot of business sense to transfer people into roles that work well for them and the company wherever possible.
Do not use transferring as a way of avoiding dealing with a problem person or passing the problem to someone else. This will damage your reputation.
Transfer individuals that have a great attitude, fit well into the culture of the company and have good relationships with colleagues. Find a suitable role or build the business case to create one.
Have an honest conversation with the person who is incompetent in their role. Explain the gap in current performance and expected performance and run through the options available to them. Sell them the alternative role and why it will be better for them and the company.
fairly remove incompetent employees from the team – The last step
It is damaging to the team, the company and you personally to leave an incompetent person in your team as they will reduce overall team performance significantly. The biggest impact on team performance from incompetent people comes through the negative impact they have on performance expectations and standards across the team and on the culture and work ethic within the team.
Help the incompetent employee leave with dignity and be respectful where possible. Give them enough notice to find another job or give them a fair offer to leave via a settlement agreement or similar.
If they don’t want to leave, then go down the performance management path. The steps in this would typically be:
- Set really clear expectations and performance standards in writing
- Start a performance improvement plan to formally set expectations and enable formal assessment of performance. Undertaking a PIP is as much about managing the perceptions of the team you keep as it is about removing an underperformer.
- If they fail the PIP, start a disciplinary process as needed, leading to them being removed.
Do not keep an incompetent person in your team. Doing so is toxic for your management career and the team and business performance.
Fairly and nicely remove the individual as quickly as possible.
in summary
Do not ignore an incompetent person in your team or any individual that falls behind the average performance of the team for any length of time.
Keep asking questions until you find out what the issues are behind the drop in performance or incompetence. Once you know what the issues are you have a much better chance of helping them improve or taking better action quickly.
Assess their potential against their current role and alternative roles within the business to determine the sensible options available.
Transfer incompetent people into a role where they will be competent if they have the right attitude and cultural fit.
The last option is to remove them from the team. Do this as quickly, fairly and nicely as possible. Do not keep a significant underperformer or incompetent employee on your team.
If you have any questions on How to Manage Incompetent Employees, please email me at support@enhance.training
Spotting and tackling incompetent employees quickly is one of the most important people management tasks when taking over a new team. If you have been managing your team for more than six months, your focus is to spot as early as possible anyone who might start to struggle to keep up with average standard of their peers.
Not intervening with incompetent employees is toxic to your reputation, the respect you are given and your promotion prospects. To avoid person impact, take positive constructive action that improves the performance and standards within the team!
Jess Coles
