[lazide]

Sometimes you end up with someone who can’t do the job that they were hired for, or won’t, without constant direction. Sometimes they come into the job this way, sometimes factors outside of your control put them here.

Sometimes you can have a Frank discussion about it, or regular ‘adult’ type discussion, and there is something that can be done that fixes it, and it can be fixed. That is not always the case. Sometimes the person is fundamentally incapable of doing the work (rare), or in a place they can’t care about or don’t want to do it - but won’t or can’t acknowledge it.

Re:accountability - there are many different definitions one can use for what this really means. The clearest I am familiar with is ‘if you can’t or won’t do the job to standard, and there is no special circumstance like a leave that should be applied, you don’t have that job anymore’.

That is easier said than done in many business environments.

I’ve worked in places where someone literally not doing any useful work was going on a year+ of dragging on with the team, constantly changing reasons for why they couldn’t do the job, and killing the teams morale. Literally 4 layers of management involved in HR processes trying to drive this to a useful conclusion, but new buttons being pushed every month by the employee and a highly risk adverse HR/Corp culture meant the situation couldn’t be resolved. All this on top of 6 months of coaching and attempting to help this individual be a productive member of the team.

These environments all require micromanagement of low performers as part of the performance management process - it’s the way things have to be to get the documentation and proof of coaching for CYA.

[ljm]

Your last example sounds like a complete failure of leadership. And the accountability buck stops with them for enabling that situation.

Accountability isn't easier said than done; it exists everywhere, but you choose how to apply it and when and you use your bias to decide how hard to apply the discipline.

If you feel you need to micromanage someone, then you've lost your leadership too.

[lazide]

Easy to say, but pretty useless on the ground. Which leadership is failing? Who holds whom accountable?

If you, as a leader, will get fired for holding someone accountable to the job (and firing them) and stopping a toxic environment from happening on the team, what then? What if the reason for that is some meta PR corporate reason that makes sense for corporate maybe but not for you and your team?

What if your job includes not causing those larger corporate issues and following the rules of the larger org?

It’s a failure of a large organization, and part of that failure is often making sure there is no one to actually hold accountable in a real way. It sucks. It happens.