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“Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back.”

-Piet Hein

Managing people has never been my strong suit. Likely due to my tendency to befriend everyone I meet, I’ve allowed many an employee to walk all over me. Of course, those same employees would always feign disbelief when I acknowledged my managerial shortcomings. (Why wouldn’t they? They got everything they wanted when they asked.) This inability to distance myself personally from my employees is the reason for this month’s Hard Knocks lesson.

One particular employee was a standout. He came to work early, and was persistent, focused, and proactive. He knew what it took to get the job done, and his efficiency really impressed me. So much so, in fact, that I (at his request) gave him a substantial raise months in advance of his annual review. From my rearview mirror perspective, that’s where I did him a gross disservice.

Suddenly he started showing up when most everyone else did. He would leave without even giving the door a chance to hit him in the backside. I actually started calling him “Levis”, because at 5:01p.m. he was gone, regardless of whether he was in the middle of something or not. His work started getting sloppy, and even more distressing, his service to our customers became compromised.

One day my employee received a cell-phone call while he was on the business line with one of our customers. I was walking out of my office when I heard him abruptly say “I gotta go” and hung up on our customer. I knew who he had been talking to, as I had transferred the call to him. I also noticed he made a beeline to the exit with his cell-phone in hand. Over the course of the next several days, the walking out of the office, cell-phone in hand became so disruptive that I threatened to confiscate his phone if he couldn’t stay on task.

This normally reliable young ladder-climber was falling off the rungs. I finally called him into my office and asked him what the problem was. I learned he had taken a second job, as he was about to lose his house in foreclosure. His wife had also taken a job as a cocktail waitress at a strip club, and juggling the kids was becoming a problem. I later learned that part of the juggling act was finding someone to watch the kids so he could loiter around the strip club while his wife was on shift. The strip club culture also got him started on drugs, which explained a whole lot of things in hindsight. But that’s another story for another day…

I told him he needed to refocus. I had given him a substantial raise and his productivity was on the decline. He said he had it under control, and I took him at his word. Big mistake. The cell-phone calls (while at work) got even more out of hand. One day his wife called me out of the blue and said I needed to give him another raise. (he got an earful from me for that one) I was getting more and more complaints about his service from our customers. The only warning I didn’t have was the ten-foot-high neon sign in my office flashing DANGER!!! I kept looking back at the employee he used to be rather than the employee he had become as my rationale for keeping him on-board.

Unhappy with my response (or lack thereof) to the problem, our customers started going to my boss to address their concerns. When confronted with the obvious, I relented and realized termination was the only option. I told my employee that what had originally been his personal problems getting in the way of his work had instead become his work getting in the way of his personal problems. He was devastated, and told me how bad my timing was, considering the pending foreclosure, his pending bankruptcy, and now, thanks to the strip club gig, his pending divorce. He was so wrapped up in all the external things in his life that he didn’t even realize those very things were the reason he was losing his job.

Lesson learned: Managing people requires a bird’s-eye view. Knowing how to spot the little problems can keep them from becoming really big ones. It took external forces (our customers) to help me see the forest for the trees. I did my employee no favors by catering to his request for a raise outside of normal company timelines, and I was blind to his many seemingly insignificant actions that, all rolled together, made for one huge, insurmountable hurdle. I don’t know if I could have prevented him from taking the path he did, but my customers, and subsequently my company, suffered from my refusal to acknowledge the elephant in the room.