Did You Hire Dead-Wood?

Thoughts on a New Manager's Plight with an Errant Employee

Artist’s depiction of an underperforming employee as viewed by the manager in this newsletter.

The common objection to seniority pay is, “It’s rewarding dead wood!” My response is, “Why do you hire dead wood? Or, why do you hire live wood and kill it?”

- Peter Scholtes, The Leader’s Handbook. (p. 331)

FOR TODAY’S NEWSLETTER we are once more returning to the well where good management goes to die, the r/managers sub-reddit. For those unfamiliar, this is a community on the popular Reddit site, ostensibly for managers to help each other out, which is great in theory but terrible in practice as we’ll see. Today’s subject is a new manager who asks the 136k members whether they have retained an underperforming employee too long out of some misplaced compassion and need for someone to do the menial tasks they require. In the end, the employee quit and had the temerity to set a departure date ahead of the 30 day minimum. Now the manager wonders if he should just be done with them, but needs someone to cover those 30 days. What should they do?

Of course, this situation immediately brought to mind Peter Scholtes’ famous idiom, “did you hire dead wood, or live wood and killed it?”. Let’s take a look at their cry for help:

A lot jumps out here - see if you agree:

• First red flags happen early on with a feeling of being too lenient for their employee’s poor performance and setting her up for an “informal PIP”.

• Next, we learn that the employee then decides, smartly, to resign and plans to escape ahead of their mandated 30d notice period.

• Following on this, we see the next red flags where the manager laments seeing her go early because he really needs someone to do the “brainless, menial tasks” they urgently need to cover, but can’t risk keeping her due to poor past performance.

• The manager did schedule quarterly 1:1s to highlight the employee’s poor performance, and ways to improve, but on advice of HR, identified the performance issues as “attitude-linked”.

What could we advise this manager to do differently?

1. Learn Your Job

The first thing our newly-minted manager needs to do is learn what their job is, which is to improve the system they are responsible for managing. What shakes out of this, from a Deming perspective, is that when your people fail, it’s a reflection on your ability to manage the system they work in so they can succeed.

So, the first step is, as Dr. Deming would advise, to learn what the job of a manager of people is, which is to improve their work systems and processes so they can do well and find some purpose and joy in their work. Per Deming:

The aim of management, management’s job, is to enable everybody to enjoy his work.

- Dr. W.E. Deming as quoted in Neave, Dr. Henry. The Deming Dimension. (p. 198)

We first covered this topic in our Aug 9/21 newsletter, Variation in People. A good, positive first step would be to look at the “brainless, menial tasks” that is expected of people to do and to consider how to improve it so it is more interesting and respectful of people’s innate talents and abilities.

Which brings us to:

2. Gain Appreciation for Your System and How it Works

A great deal of this young manager’s stress could be relieved if they understood and appreciated how their part of the organization functions as a system, and by extension that the majority of performance and problems belong to how it was designed and not necessarily to the employee that works within it.

This can begin by simply mapping how work gets done, by whom, and in what order.

We first covered this topic in our July 30/21 newsletter, What is My Job? This is also a core leadership competency, which we covered in our Dec 1/23 newsletter, Systems Thinking, Systems Leading.

I would pay particular attention to the hiring and oboarding processes for how they qualify new candidates, and how to design better training for new employees. It also wouldn’t hurt to consider re-designing the “brainless, meaningless tasks”.

3. Learn Some Psychology of Teams, Motivation

Next, we could advise the young manager to think back to a job they first had where they were really engaged and excited to come in and put themselves to work and ask them to describe all the reasons for that enthusiasm, from the type of work, the management, who it was being done for, and the feedback they received. What kept them motivated to keep coming back? Have them anchor on this for a while.

Now, we could ask them about a job they had that they absolutely despised so much that they couldn’t wait for each day to end. The work was unpleasant, unenjoyable, and they felt themselves demoralized by management. How did this job differ from the one they enjoyed? What were the chief impediments? What kind of motivation had them continue to go in, despite their distaste? What caused them to leave?

We could next ask the manager: What kind of job have you designed for people? One where they are enthusiastic to come in and learn how to apply their talents, or one they can’t wait to escape?

Dr. Deming devoted an entire domain in his System of Profound Knowledge to improving the study of psychology in management, particularly for leaders to appreciate how the management practices of The Old Economics affect people.

We’ve covered this topic in a number of newsletters, including Sept. 19/24 Joy in work, Aug. 13/21 Extrinsic Motivation, Mar. 20/24 Making Good People do Bad Things, and Mar. 23 The Forces of Destruction. This is also a core leadership competency, which we covered in our Jan. 15/24 newsletter, Understanding People and Why They Behave as They Do.

4. Stop Appraising People, Appraise Systems Instead

Finally, we could advise the young manager to stop the practice of inspecting their employees for defective practices and instead work on the source of most problems: the systems that cause people to make mistakes. This is the core work of improving quality, which seems to be a primary concern for them, just obscured from their view.

Once we appreciate how systems work, we realize how degrading and avoidant it is to evaluate people as a proxy for them. We’ve covered this topic a lot here, most recently in our Dec. 30/24 newsletter, Anna’s Tale, and in our Oct. 23/23 newsletter, What Can We Do Instead of Appraising People?, and our Aug. 3/21 classic newsletter, Rewarding the Weatherman.

Reflection Questions

Given what the new manager tells us in their post to r/managers, we have to surmise that they themselves are probably in a dead-end management job that will lose its lustre in short order as they devolve into becoming what Dr. Deming deemed a “manager of defects”. Did they hire dead wood, or live wood and killed it?

There’s an alternative, which this newsletter is dedicated to imparting, one bite at a time: to actually enjoy the work of managing and working with people rather than over them. It’s infinitely more rewarding and creates a shift in culture that so many seem to be chasing. It’s just hard work on the right things, in the end.

Consider the plight of the hapless new manager and the recommendations we’ve explored. Did they (or HR) hire dead wood, or live wood and killed it? What other recommendations would you make to them for how they handled the employee’s performance? Can better performance be “inspected-in” to an employee? What responsibility does top-management have for the quality of candidate they hire and develop? What does the employee’s early departure suggest? How could the manager have better applied their time in 1:1s with the employee rather than setting them up for a PIP?

What “brainless, menial job” did you have in the past? What made it so? How did you escape? Were you fired? What did the experience teach you? How have you paid those lessons forward? To what effect?

As always, let me know your thoughts in the comments below.