Struggling Employees
Struggling Employees
Don’t let struggling employees pull you down with them.
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All of us need help once in a while. If we hit a roadblock in our jobs we might need advice, training or new skills. It’s a natural part of growing! However, an employee that needs continuous help to do their job over long periods isn’t learning and growing, they are struggling.
Struggling employees rarely blame themselves. Struggling salespeople rarely say that they should generate more pipeline, improve their pitch or refine their discovery/qualification. Struggling engineers rarely say that they should learn new technologies and architecture to work on a codebase.
What struggling employees usually do is blame you. Struggling salespeople say that you aren’t giving them quality leads, or good enablement or a good product. Struggling engineers say that you have a bad process, too much tech debt or the wrong technologies. There is always a way to spin failure into being someone else’s fault.
Very few people have enough self-confidence and a solid enough ego to take the blame for struggling, it’s much easier to project their failures onto you. If you’re the CEO, that means you become the target of a lot of projection.
If you don’t realize this is happening, it can be very hard to handle. You hear people telling you how bad of a leader you are, and how many mistakes you have made. These are people you hired because you believed they were great additions to your team, and the criticism can lead to self doubt. Self doubt leads to mistakes and mistakes reinforce the criticism.
Even worse, struggling employees can become toxic employees by sharing their complaints with everyone else. They will tell everyone on the team that you’re the reason they can’t be successful. They will say that no one could be successful in their job because of you. If you aren’t careful, that idea can spread and infect your entire team.
Trust me when I say the stakes are high.
Every team of more than a few people will have at least one employee struggling. Sometimes it’s because they were a mis-hire, and sometimes it’s that their job is changing faster than they can adapt. Sometimes it’s their fault, and sometimes it’s not.
The first step is to identify struggling employees, and here are some signs an employee is struggling:
They take longer than their peers to complete the same tasks, or cannot complete them at all.
They push back on simple tasks that should be easy to complete.
They start to work fewer hours, or be less available online.
They start complaining a lot about everything wrong with the company.
When you find a struggling employee you need to act. Maybe you need to change their role, or provide deeper training. Or maybe you need to part ways. Whatever the solution, you can’t let the situation continue and simply hope they will figure it out.
Whatever you do, you cannot let them become a toxic employee! Signs a struggling employee is becoming toxic:
Other employees start to repeat their complaints.
Employee satisfaction on their team goes down quickly.
The quality of the work of their entire team declines.
When an employee becomes toxic, you need to part ways with them immediately. There is little to do to salvage such a situation, and the longer they are at your company the more their toxicity will infect the others around them.
As I said at the beginning, most employees don’t fall into these categories. They need some help to get over roadblocks, or a bit of time to learn new skills. And not all struggling employees become toxic!
But you need to know the signs and act quickly, as we don’t want struggling employees to lead to a struggling company.
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