my employee makes up words and is impossible to understand — Ask a Manager

I’ve written in and taken your advice on other topics before — and it has been helpful — but I really struggled with putting things into practice on this one. I think it’s because being directly faced with what feels like genuine absurdity is somehow paralyzing to me. With other issues I’ve dealt with in the past, it’s like we both at least knew we were starting from a point of shared understanding or difficulty but in this one, that’s not the case.

You gave some good tips about how to try and ground the discussions in creating a shared understanding, but overall I took what might be the “easy” way out and steered toward the first part of your advice: if his work wasn’t great, focus on those issues instead. And that hasn’t gone much better!

First though, before I go on, I remember in the comments a lot of people wanted to know examples of the words he would make up. If you’ve ever seen the Knives Out: Glass Onion movie and you’re familiar with the vague nonsense words made up by Edward Norton’s character, it’s just like that! Just this morning we had a chat where he talked about needing to “capacitize” something, which I think meant enabling a feature of some software. There’s also a lot of pronunciation nonsense — recently plethora came out as pleTHORa, which I guess is a mistake some people make but it still feels like a twilight zone moment to me. Other misuses include “repointering” which I’ve gathered usually means to fix; there’s also a lot of “getting up” in relation to things that don’t make sense (so, real words, fake meanings) like “I need to work on getting up my SQLs” which, like, perhaps that means troubleshoot a SQL query, but it’s so very hard to know.

I tried to focus on the work quality issues and I’ve never felt more weirdly gaslit in my managerial life! That term — gaslighting — gets thrown around a lot these days, and I don’t take its use lightly, but he often just starts talking and doesn’t stop and the words coming out are so disconnected from reality! I’ve taken a lot more to just directly telling him I have no idea what he’s trying to say. I also interrupt him way more to tell him to stop talking so I can take what he’s trying to outline step by step, and I’ll often be really specific — like saying, “Stop, let me repeat what I think step 1 of XYZ is, then just tell me, yes or no. Am I correct in my understanding?” It’s much more direct and gruff than I have ever been with an employee and feels unnatural to me, but it has been a bit helpful. Sometimes he still just goes off into word salad but I just interrupt him again.

Now, all of that said, here’s the fun (sarcasm!) part. Someone else in our industry somehow put together that he was working for us, and passed along a note highlighting that he’s also listed as currently working at another organization in an identical role on their website. We went to HR to see what we should do and to ask if the background check had verified start and termination dates for his prior employment, and hilariously our HR person said she “didn’t know if we actually looked at or kept background check information” and then also told us that as long as I couldn’t point to a specific degradation in performance, it was perfectly fine for an employee to have two full-time jobs. She encouraged us to ask him directly, which we did, and he denied it. And that denial was good enough for HR.

More broadly and for other reasons, I’ve soured a bit on my current employer and I think 2025 might be a year to make a change. For that reason, I’ve given up trying to do anything substantive with this employee. He can be their problem after I (hopefully!) find a new gig. That’s perhaps a bad karma choice, but I have been open with my boss and HR about my struggles with managing him and haven’t gotten much support and my current strategies of verbally badgering him into spoon-feeding me updates and progress have resulted in us successfully keeping things running, so there aren’t unrecoverable bad outcomes from his relative incompetence, just a ton of effort on me to keep it all together. My energy to dedicate to that effort is waning, so it’s time to whip out the trusty Ask a Manager guides on job searching and freshen things up!

Hopefully the next time you hear from me it will be a new and interesting problem at a new job! 🙂