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How To Deal With Incompetent People

When your people, employees, colleagues, partners, co-workers are dealing with incompetence u2013 knowing how to manage that process is vitally important to your success as a leader and team player.<br>

deepakshukla
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How To Deal With Incompetent People

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  1. When your people, employees, colleagues, partners, co-workers are dealing with incompetence – knowing how to manage that process is vitally important to your success as a leader and team player. I’ve had some frustrations with what I feel are obvious errors with a couple people within my team – and the truth is, is that this will come up no matter what team you’re in or what level of business you’re at. So – here’s goes at least some advice on how to manage these types of situations:

  2. DON’T LOSE YOUR COOL WITH INCOMPETENT PEOPLE The problem with every conversation I had (regardless of the reason) was that I’d go in like a charging bull and it would make any attempt at constructive conversation worse. When you see something ‘simple’ done badly, it’s easy (for me at least) to go nuclear almost immediately and then start coming at the person in question. This would cause raised voices, threats (in my head at least), shouting, and generally nothing more constructive than berating the other person – causing him to go on the defensive. And us both walking away having not made much progress until someone conceded. That’s just an absolutely terrible way to lead.

  3. DON’T GET THEM FIRED Defaulting to telling of someone’s incompetence to management with a view to getting them fired is definitely very far away from the first item on a list of possible actions. This is definitely something to be avoided.

  4. PUT YOURSELF IN THE OTHER PERSON’S SHOES Remember, (and I’m also telling myself this lol) – no one sets out to be incompetent. No-one walks into a conversation with someone else intending to rip them off, do badly by them, or generally leave them in such a place that they think ‘man I got totally ripped off’. So where you can, be empathetic. For the most part, when someone says they’ll do something they DO have every intention of doing it. They DO have every intention of doing it well – and when something doesn’t work out they probably need some guidance is all. Don’t FORGET all of these things when you go into a conversation with them – keep this all in mind.

  5. COMMUNICATE CLEARLY AND EXPLICITLY When giving someone something to do – make sure that it’s very clear in his/her mind exactly what needs to be done. The classic mistake that leads to employee or partner incompetence in this instance is not asking properly about their understanding of what’s needed. Something such as ‘can you repeat back to me in your own words your understanding of it’ is one such thing you can get in the habit of saying. Another way to ask is ‘spot check’ someone’s knowledge of what’s going on – by saying ‘give me a couple of takeaway’s you have from listening to this’. There are probably other ways of doing this you’re already thinking of that are much better than above – but thinking in this vein will definitely help drill out incompetence.

  6. THE IMPORTANCE OF USING OBJECTIVE LANGUAGE When you’re going to talk to someone about their incompetent performance – it’s important to ensure that you keep things objective. Using language that could constitute anything that could be considered a personal insult is not going to help you at all. Neither are inflammatory words such as ‘terrible’, ‘horrible’ or otherwise. So for 100% of the conversation keep the language clean and objective and don’t let it slide into anything emotional – no matter how emotional you might be feeling about the incompetent results you’ve seen.

  7. APPRECIATE THEIR CONTRIBUTION AS WELL It’s important within showing someone what is wrong with what they did when dealing with incompetence that you don’t completely crush someone. It’s not productive to leave someone feeling completely deflated (which can happen even in the best of circumstances) after walking through everything that’s wrong about their work. So, try to look at the things they’re doing well also – and there always will be things to shine the spotlight on here. This can be their effort, the attempt and just being around to do this in general.

  8. FINAL THOUGHTS Dealing with employee incompetence or just dealing with incompetent people, in general, is always a challenge. Hopefully, this blog offers some insights into how to deal with this the next time a situation occurs in your workplace!

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