If you’re reading this, you are in my Secrets group. Please don’t discuss my secrets with others, even if they are listed on my Friends page, they are not likely to be secrets_ok. If you’re uncomfortable about keeping secrets, best not to read below the line. I’ve added a couple people to my Secrets group, so if this is your first secret, there are some previous entries now visible to you that weren’t before, so if you get bored, enjoy. :-) Things have become quite tense with C. C and I had a very long chat today, which was good in a lot of ways. I explained that when he refused to sign the written warning on Monday, that had made me quite angry. I probably should not have taken it personally, but I did.
The background was, I issued him a warning on Feb 7, for failing to do his job, basically. I characterized him as avoiding difficult work and choosing easier, less important work instead, and avoiding work that required communicating and collaborating with people. That month, I saw a short term improvement in performance, and then when the intense scrutiny was off, I noticed the same behavior sneaking in. On top of that, he had 6 sick days in a month, more than he had used in the whole year-plus before that. Finally, when the heat was mostly off, he told me he didn’t want to be on call at all for the next six weeks, citing religious reasons.
This led to me writing a second warning, this time instead of a page and a half, it was three and a half pages. I told him that this was it, there would be no more warnings after this, that if he didn’t straighten up and fly right immediately, the only thing left for me to do was to notify HR of when his last day should be. This was given to him last week on Thursday.
His response was basically ‘if you’ve already decided to fire me, why not do it, why prolong the torture?’ I didn’t give him a second chance in order to torture him, but perhaps that is the way he saw it. I responded that if we weren’t friends, he would have already been fired. I think he interpreted this to mean that because we had been friendly, I would have to force him to jump through more hoops just to prove that I was being objective. But what I meant was almost the opposite, that if I didn’t really care what happened to him, I would have taken an “easy” way out and arranged for him to be laid off or something. I felt that because I had encouraged him down the “project manager” path and later taken that away from him, that the change in job expectations wasn’t entirely his fault.
I issued him the second written warning on Thursday, and he asked if I would change something on it, which I agreed to do, but he left before I gave him the revised copy to sign, and he called in sick the next day. When I finally presented him with the modified version on Monday, he refused to sign. I wrote “Refused to sign; employee and I have discussed this, and he has been provided with a copy” and took it up to HR. I was mad! How petty! A meaningless act of defiance, was what I thought. If that’s the way he wants to play it, I’m not giving him the benefit of the doubt anymore.
So, I spend about two hours at work and six more hours at home, combing through old email I had saved, to or from him, looking for any documentation of the problems I brought up, anytime over the last 15 months or so. I printed about 60 mail messages, scribbled notes on them, and then proceeded to create a spreadsheet showing the dates and what was discussed, labelling each one with categories such as “Communication issue, productivity issue, access project, complaints about others, attendance,” etc. My intention was two fold: one, to make sure there were no second chances, and two, to make sure that I was prepared in case he should try to make a discrimination case out of it.
I showed the email summary to both Boss and HR Guy, and the response from HR guy was, there’s a pretty clear audit trail here going back quite some time, and if he had seen this before, he would have recommended termination rather than a second written warning. But, he also said, since we did issue the second warning, we need to let that play out, so that we can’t be accused of giving him something to try and then not letting him try. I was still angry about the situation, all day Monday and Tuesday, and being quite tired Tuesday didn’t help matters. But, I agreed this was reasonable advice, as did Boss.
More events on Tuesday made me want him gone even more. One was that I said “I need to start seeing daily status reports again” and he responded with something like “Can you spell out in writing exactly what requirements are being set, including duration?” I basically said that because he was in a senior position, I should not have to spell out every task for him, but told him the three things I would expect him to complete within the next week or so. If the tasks were not clear, I would expect him to compose the list of tasks himself and show it to me for comment. Boss echoed back the same point, that expectations are not always clear, and that’s consistent with a senior position. This was all via email, not in a one-on-one setting, so it was easier to be snide to each other, and easier to take offense. He wrote back something like “Your comment about telling me which key to hit was pretty immature, could you talk like an adult please?” I was tempted to say “You mean mature like refusing to sign the warning?” but I held off.
Wednesday went pretty well, he actually did a code release, on his own, and everything went pretty smoothly. Go, C! I was skeptical, still, thinking that after he had wheeled out the Good Boy behavior for a few weeks, it would go back into the closet again and he would go back to playing the system to his benefit instead of pulling his weight. I was still pretty cynical and still bitter about the Monday experience.
Finally, we get to today’s one-on-one. I told him I was pretty angry about the refusal to sign, and he responded that I should not take it personally. He claims that he was advised not to sign anything. (I’m skeptical about this, what kind of employment lawyer would advise someone to stack insubordination onto the list of offenses one is already accused of?) It’s at this point I let slip about how I had catalogued and inventoried numerous messages and conversations over the last year. (This is what poker players refer to as “tipping one’s hand” :) My intention was to get across that if he tried to sue the company, his dirty laundry would be hung out to dry, if that’s what it would take to show that our actions were justified.
Of course he was shocked by this, and felt betrayed, but I reassured him that protecting his confidence was one of my top priorities. I would guard his personal information to the best of my power, but if I were somehow compelled to testify on whether I believe the right actions were taken, this information would have to be discussed. It’s more or less at this point that he sort of backed off of the vague threats to sue and said “Well I really only meant that I would take action if the company tried to keep me from getting unemployment or something”.
The rest of the meeting was positive, I reassured him again that I knew he had the skills and that he could do an excellent job if so motivated, and that I would support him as long as he was keeping up the current level of effort and performance. I encouraged him to find tasks that were interesting to him, to stretch his own creativity, and to push himself to stretch muscles and build skills. It ended on a very positive note.
But, I still feel vaguely dirty about making threats to expose emails that were supposed to be private. I still believe I did the right thing, but I feel like it is something that will haunt me for a few weeks. I didn’t say “Do what I say or I will take this stack of paper and beat you with it,” but I did say “I will keep your confidences if at all possible, but I will totally defend this company however I have to.”
On the one hand, I feel like it is my job to defend the company, and that I would need to do so regardless of my personal feelings. On the other hand, though, I can’t deny that I was angry about the situation on Monday and aggressively pursued trying to get him out quickly and trying to justify such action. On the one hand, if someone brings a wrongful termination action against the company, you had better believe that supervisors will be asked what was said when, and old email will be examined. On the other hand, I’m not required to keep old email around, and if I had said “I believe it was discussed, but I’m not sure when” nobody would look at me funny. Perhaps I’m acting a little overzealously because this is the first time I have had to deal with severe employee problems and I want to make sure I do everything correctly. Perhaps it just irks me that I’m doing everything I can do for this guy, and yet he’s accusing me of some kind of discrimination (apparently I don’t even realize it, but it is there, a double standard. hmph)
My sweety was a bit more pragmatic than I; she pointed out that if it ever comes to a legal case, the company could examine the email on the server or on my desktop with or without my permission. This is true, but it doesn’t change the dirty feeling from having acted under the influence of anger, and having threatened him. I probably would still have wanted to go over the mail record for my own peace of mind (and in fact I had intended to do this even before he refused to sign). I think it would have been much better to keep my big mouth shut though.
If you made it this far, I would be interested in your thoughts. (Don’t disclose any of YOUR secrets though, save that for your own journal :)