When Ignorance Isn’t Bliss
What do you do with an employee who is incompetent but can't see it?
At first, Elizabeth McRae Smith, 37, couldn't put two and
two together. But soon she suspected the truth: One of her
employees was hopelessly incompetent.
A pattern of typos and bad grammar was hurting Smith's
business. "This person had incompetence in a number of areas
that are important to public relations and even caused some
problems with clients that I had to fix," says Smith, founder
and CEO of The McRae Agency, a PR firm with six employees.
| "You just can't save some employees
from themselves. Entrepreneurs can work too long trying to fix
things." |
She found that gentle reminders didn't work, so she started
amassing a paper trail of the employee's mistake-laden
projects, e-mails and reports. Last summer, one year after the
employee was hired on at the 6-year-old San Francisco firm, she
decided on a performance review where she and another supervisor
would individually rank the employee on a number of skill sets,
while the employee would rate herself. Smith was dumbfounded when
the two sides compared notes. She and the supervisor thought that
improvement was needed in every category, but the employee rated
herself as good or excellent in every category.
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Chances are, you'll eventually have employees who rate
themselves as "above average" in a wide array of
abilities they clearly don't have. Maybe it's an employee
who thinks she's an outstanding public speaker but isn't, a
secretary who fancies himself a writer but puts out horribly
disjointed memos, or a sales rep who greatly overestimates her
ability to close big deals.
But here's the rub: What you see as a glaring deficiency,
these employees view as a strong competency. Smith's employee
saw herself as supremely qualified-if not destined-for a career in
PR, but Smith saw a gaping set of obstacles the worker could not
seem to grasp.
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