Make It Worse

At Ask a Manager, Alison Green takes a question (Item 2) about a difficult employee who is apparently as good at being a discipline problem and gaming union rules as he is bad at his job.

Her answer about this "impossible to fire" employee reads in part:

You deal with the grievances. You discipline them every time, pointing to what sounds like a clear policy violation. Otherwise, you don't really have a uniform policy; you have a uniform "suggestion," and other employees will notice.

Also, you tackle the performance issues aggressively and head-on. Follow the requirements of your CBA, obviously, but you should tackle the performance issues to the full extent of the options available to you, even if that involves a ton of paperwork and aggravation. Otherwise it'll be a year from now and you'll be no better off than you are now. So play the grievance ping-pong and stand firm. [bold added]

This is consistent with an earlier piece of hers that she links to, titled, "You Can't Be Held Hostage to a Bad Employee," where she makes the implications of not taking on such burdens crystal clear:

...As soon as you hear yourself saying that you can't fire a bad employee because of Reasons, that's a flag that you have a huge problem on your hands and that you need to immediately and actively start working to change the situation. You have to find a way to be okay with firing bad employees; you can't let your organization be hostage to a destructive force.

And really, the reasons that people feel "held hostage" are generally pretty bad ones. If you won't let someone go because no one knows how to do her job, what are you going to do when she resigns one day? Or has a serious health issue that takes her away from work for a few months? Or makes demands that you just can't meet? Or, if you won't let someone go because she'll trash-talk you in important communities, why are you entrusting knowledge of the inner workings of your organization to someone who you believe would basically act as an enemy if given the opportunity? And are you really willing to give this person what amounts to the power to make any demand on you that she wants? [bold added]

The phrase Things are going to get worse before they get better bubbled up from my subconscious as I read these posts.

Not every problem is like this, of course, but occasionally, problems arise which, by their nature will require, in the short run, even more of what solving them will help one avoid, like paperwork, confrontation, and lost productivity.

But, as Green indicates, the short-term worsening will eventually solve the problem and is the price of solving the problem and at least starting to have agency.

That being the case, I'd say that sometimes it pays to make it worse on your terms sooner than later or never.

-- CAV