The Manager Who Never Said Anything
A team lead I was working with had one person on her crew who’d been coasting for the better part of a year — showing up late, missing details, letting deadlines slide by a day or two at a time. When I asked her about it directly, she said, “Yeah, it’s not great. I just don’t want to make it weird.”
The rest of the team wasn’t confused about the problem. They’d been quietly picking up the slack for months. What confused them was watching it go on with no consequence, meeting after meeting, while everyone else kept being held to the standard.
Two of her strongest people started interviewing elsewhere that same quarter — not over pay, as it turned out, but because watching someone underperform with nothing ever happening told them the standard wasn’t actually real.
How long would someone have to underperform on your team before someone actually sat down and said so to their face?
