update: can I suggest that my employee rethink her career path?

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

Remember the letter-writer wondering whether to suggest that their employee rethink her career path? (They were having to outsource a large report she should have been responsible for because of the quality of her work.) Here’s the update.

Mindy is still with our organization, but possibly not for much longer. We ended up not outsourcing the report, but I had several conversations with her over the course of this year about her growth with the organization, as she’d requested a promotion to a senior manager role — a position which didn’t exist at the time — in her annual performance review. At the guidance of our HR team (who are great — they’re compassionate, inclusive, and smart, and I’ve gotten them hooked on AAM), I discussed the possibility of a promotion several times over a few months with her, and asked her to come up with ways her role would expand to become a higher-level position, e.g. new tasks or areas of responsibility she’d take on, how she would take a fuller role in decision-making and managing projects, etc. I also praised her frequently for the tasks she did well, and asked her to suggest ways to adjust her responsibilities to play more to her strengths. Unfortunately, she never brought me any ideas.

By the end of September, our team’s workload had grown so much (our organization is in an awesome growth period) that my boss told me I could hire a senior manager. I worked with HR and my boss to develop a job description that was standard for a senior manager position, which unfortunately Mindy didn’t meet the qualifications for in terms of years of experience, writing skills, and ability to manage projects independently. My boss and I told my direct reports that we would be creating the position during a team meeting, noting they could apply if interested, and Mindy did not look happy about it. Due to work travel and a tsunami of projects, I wasn’t able to debrief with Mindy and dig into how she was feeling about everything before she left on a three-week international vacation. She’s returning next week after the application window closes. We’ve received several hundred applications for the position, including some true standouts, so if nothing else, it will become clear to her the gap between her expectation of a promotion for the sake of being promoted, and the skills and expertise needed to reach the next level in her communications career.

Mindy’s counterpart on our team is also deeply struggling — she was hired almost two years ago, and has never met the level of quality, attention to detail, timeliness, professionalism, and critical thinking we need from someone in her position. The plan is to offer her separation with a generous severance package after the holidays (again, our org and HR are wonderful — I wish everyone had a team so supportive and kind). I’m planning to tuck away some of the strong candidates I can’t hire for the senior role and interview them for the junior role when Mindy’s counterpart is no longer with us. I would not be surprised at all if Mindy also decided to leave, so I may be dipping several times into that applicant pool.

I do want to let the commenters from the original post know that I read every comment, but I wasn’t in a position to respond for the next few days. Most of the comments were helpful (most of them–some were just mean, but that’s the internet for you), and I wanted to clarify a few things: My boss, Mindy’s direct manager until I was hired, had a soft spot for her since Mindy had worked for her ever since getting her undergrad degree. For the first year and a half of my time with the organization, I was assessing and getting a feel for how things needed to get done. One commenter smartly and correctly noted that communications can look and feel very different between organizations; mine has a very specific tone and type of messaging that Mindy has never mastered. I spent another year and a half supportively coaching Mindy and giving her clear expectations on her work before finally accepting that she just didn’t have the skills I needed from someone in her role.

My boss has really had my back, and she’s said to me that she knows now that she waited too long to address Mindy’s issues. Mindy is seriously a great person, so I think we all tried for longer than we should have to get her where she needed to be, but it’s just not working out.

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