When faced with a struggling employee who is a personal friend of the CEO, managers must use their best judgement to find a solution. This episode explores how to approach these 'gray-area decisions' by gathering information, considering consequences, and aligning with organizational and personal values.
Imagine you’re a new manager, and one of your team members consistently underperforms. But there’s a catch: your struggling employee is a personal friend of your CEO. When performance review time rolls around, should you be honest and give them a low rating?says that hard and fast rules only go so far in these sorts of situations. Instead, managers must use their best judgement to find a solution.
JOE BADARACCO: Sure. The case is an unusual case, it’s written in the first person, so you’ve got to give the protagonist a name. So, let’s call her Susan. But you’re really hearing Susan’s voice and you’re hearing Susan tell her story. So, she was a computer science graduate, this is her first job, full-time job. She’d had a couple internships at Microsoft. She was a very talented programmer.
JOE BADARACCO: Well, I think she was kind of a millennial, but I think she was basically herself and she prided herself on being very direct to the point of being blunt. She thought that in organizations, people were rarely treated honestly, that there were lots of games played that people told you you were doing well when you weren’t doing so well and so forth. She said she was going to be blunt, she wanted people to be blunt with her.
BRIAN KENNY: So, what are some of the things as a manager that Susan needs to think about? I mean, it doesn’t seem like she’s in a place where she can just sever that relationship and have Terry move along. There’s a process that she has to go through both intellectually as well as managerially. BRIAN KENNY: You mentioned before the obligation that Susan as a manager has to Terry. Does Terry have an obligation back to Susan to do the job well? Does that make the whole decision much-
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