A reader writes:
I am a supervisor of one direct report, “Jennifer,” in a program that provides a niche, social work-adjacent service within a nonprofit agency. Jennifer and I used to be peers within this program, though we worked at different locations, and we were friendly. When I became her supervisor (my first management role), the then-program director, “Emma,” told me, “Jennifer likes you, maybe she will listen to you.”
Turns out, Jennifer is a problem employee. For years, she has not met key productivity goals. She sometimes changes her shift without approval or notice. Emma said another staff member told her Jennifer offhandedly said that when she didn’t feel like doing a key piece of her job, she would falsify documentation to make it look like she had. I can’t prove it and I don’t know who this staff member was, but data definitely supports this claim. And when Jennifer doesn’t do her work, I have to because when we drop balls, our clients’ literal safety is compromised.
Emma didn’t warn me about the problems with Jennifer because she didn’t want to poison the well, so I approached her performance problems with a lot more grace that I would have had I known they were long-standing. I do document issues in our one-on-ones and try to be solutions-oriented. Jennifer has improved in her metrics slightly, but she always backslides.
I recently discovered Jennifer hadn’t updated at least some client files in over five months, and it was the final straw. Emma had just left the agency, so I went to our second-in-command, “Carol,” to ask for authority to start some actual discipline on the problems that I’ve been documenting; I don’t have the authority to do it on my own. Carol told me she didn’t understand why Jennifer wasn’t fired before I even had this role, and to draft up a PIP for her approval.
Now Carol has told me to stop everything: Jennifer has filed a complaint with the EEOC for racial discrimination. Any disciplinary action will need to involve the executive director. They have not seen what the allegations in the complaint, but I know Jennifer applied for the role I am in now. Emma and I are white; Jennifer, Carol, and the executive director are Black. I don’t know if Jennifer has made any allegations about me specifically.
I know a lot of this is on me: I waited far too long to ask to start formal disciplinary processes. I am also second-guessing every interaction with Jennifer because I absolutely don’t want to behave with any bias, and because I don’t want to give any appearance of retaliation. I also don’t want to leave my job. How do I survive this situation for however long it takes to address the EEOC complaint?
At this point you’re going to need to coordinate everything with Carol (or whoever she designates, like legal counsel) because the problem is that managing Jennifer in the way she really should be managed is going to look like retaliation, since it didn’t happen earlier when it should have.
That’s not on you, by the way; it’s on Emma. Emma is the one who apparently spent years allowing Jennifer not to meet productivity goals, was told Jennifer was falsifying documentation and didn’t do anything about it, and didn’t bother to fill you in about what was going on when you took over.
Emma saying she didn’t fill you in because she “didn’t want to poison the well” is laughable. The instinct not to poison the well can make sense when, for example, you don’t like someone’s style of leading meetings but maybe their new boss won’t mind it, or you clashed on a personal level but their work was fine — not when an employee has had years-long productivity issues and also falsifies reports. It’s more likely that Emma knew she had been egregiously negligent in her own job and didn’t want to call attention to that.
I don’t know how long you’ve been managing Jennifer, but it sounds like you’ve been fairly forthright in trying to address her work problems, and you were on the verge of escalating things (appropriately) when the EEOC complaint happened. So while it’s certainly possible that you should have moved faster or more assertively, the bulk of responsibility lies with Emma — and also with Carol, who apparently knew enough to wonder why Jennifer hadn’t been fired earlier but didn’t intervene.
What’s happening now happens more than you might think: an employer is finally about to deal with a performance problem after letting it fester for months or years, but then something happens that complicates that significantly … like a death in the person’s family (making the timing of serious discipline seem callous), or a pregnancy or serious illness (making the timing seem suspiciously like discrimination), or the person reporting harassment or discrimination (making the timing seem like retaliation). If the person was allowed to operate this way for months/years without it being addressed in a serious way and then the employer decides to crack down right after something like that, even if that’s not what actually drove them to act, their motives will look extremely suspect. It’s one of many reasons that it’s important to address serious issues quickly, so that you don’t end up in the situation you’re in now.
Again, it’s not your fault that you’re here. At this point, though, lawyers are involved and claims of retaliation will be a real risk, so you’re going to need to coordinate anything you do with your agency’s legal counsel … which is probably going to hamstring you significantly for a while.
