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It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager and I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.
There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.
Remember the letter-writer whose employee regularly forgot important details and entire conversations? Here’s the update.
I’m the person who wrote in earlier this year about Arnold, my direct report who seemed to forget everything he was told. I appreciated your advice and all the commenters who had shared stories of dealing with their own memory loss at work or working with someone like Arnold. I also agree with your suggestion that what was going on wasn’t gaslighting. I think I was just so baffled by all my interactions with Arnold because it seemed he and I were operating in two fully separate realities.
My update is that Arnold’s memory problems are the least of my worries at this point. I did take your advice to try to be much clearer about the pattern of forgetting things and the impact it was having, but things got worse in other ways.
Part of the reason I hired Arnold was so he could manage a few of the high-profile projects that were previously on my own plate. These projects involve regularly meeting with and presenting to senior leaders, including the head of the department. The goal was for Arnold to take these over independently so that I could focus on other work with my team.
Likely due to the memory issues, Arnold repeatedly provided incorrect information to department leaders and made several awkward faux pas with them that made it seem like he didn’t understand what was going on in meetings. I provided regular feedback of my own and shared the feedback I was hearing from others. Arnold mostly blamed the issues on being new (he was in the role for well over six months at this point) or being paired with subpar coworkers for his work. So not only was he not able to independently take over the projects I hired him to take, but he was causing additional work for me in having to fix his mistakes and smooth things over with the leaders and coworkers he worked with.
I had a few instances where some of my best employees confided in me about issues in working with Arnold. They were frustrated about having to repeatedly tell him information or train him on a process, and that frustration would eventually show up in their interactions with him when he asked, again, how to do something. Arnold would then get angry with the coworkers because he said they were not helping him. But they had! He just didn’t remember it.
When I tried to coach him about these interactions and what he could do differently in the future, he started to point fingers rather than take any form of responsibility. His solution was to message me any time he had a disagreement with a teammate. He said he “figured they’d tell me about it first” and he wanted me to hear his side. What’s funny is that he was mostly outing himself on these issues, because his teammates rarely came to me about the run-ins Arnold was telling me about. It was also clear that he had no issue remembering these interactions with coworkers, so it made me feel even more confused about his memory loss related to the conversations we had that were relevant to his work!
It was clear that he needed a more formal performance plan to address the issues. I asked my manager to have a 1:1 with him so I could get her take before making the decision between a lighter coaching plan and a PIP. Arnold told my manager during that discussion that his hands were tied and that I needed to reprioritize the work of my whole team so more people could help him in his projects. I was stunned when my manager recapped the conversation, because it showed such a lack of judgment and understanding of the work on the team that Arnold would even suggest that as a workable solution. Luckily my manager had my back and was equally baffled by Arnold’s recommendation.
That was pretty much the last straw. (Also, the head of our department told me, unprompted, that she would support going straight to a PIP just based on the handful of work quality issues she knew about firsthand.)
During the PIP conversation, Arnold was surprised and angry. He said that I had set him up to fail and that he didn’t think things could improve unless some of his coworkers were replaced on the projects he was working on. I told him I had no plans to do that.
I wish I had a happier update! We’ll see how the next few months go.
The post update: my employee regularly forgets important details and entire conversations appeared first on Ask a Manager.
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