Ever work with someone like this?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I work with a younger man of 29. He’s black and he’s been with my company for 10 years. Let’s call him David. He started out as an intern – a lackey, an IT guy who set up computers at people’s desks, etc. I should say that I mention his race because it’s a big deal to him, as he’s either hinting around about inequities or is just sometimes rather direct about it. He can be militant at times. The ironic thing is that he grew up a very wealthy suburb of Baltimore and is seemingly part of a very good family. While I’m telling this bit, I think it’s important to mention two other characters. His manager is a little Napolean type guy who’s really a wimp if you give him the slightest bit of resistance. He likes military stuff, sports a high-and-tight, has some modded out Jeep with oversized tires, and he’s a God-fearing Christian – in the dumb way (talks of church and the Bible sometimes, inappropriately). Anyway, his boss’s boss, who’s my manager, is a really skittish guy who professes to being the biggest bleeding-heart liberal in the world and there’s nothing I’ve seen from either his words or his actions that would lead me to think otherwise.

So, you have the suburban militant, the dumb, scared little man, and the skittish techie who’s pretty brilliant, just not socially.

David actually comes into the office 3 days a week – well, he’s supposed to, but he’s usually here 2. He’s supposed to be in at 8 and leave at 5, but he usually works from 11 to 4, maybe 5. He does a very menial task-based job that most IT data center guys start out doing but will quickly pass it off and graduate onto something more intellectually stimulating. He’s been doing this function for the last 8 years. He doesn’t even try to do anything else. He just complains about his job and how management doesn’t make the right decisions, etc.

David also has a horrible attitude – about anything work-related. Asking him to do something within in the boundaries of his job description automatically brings resistance. “Why?” “This is stupid.” Blah, blah, blah. Anything extra-curricular? Forget it. Don’t even bother. Not only will you get a bunch of shit, but he won’t do it anyway.

So, we have a weekly ritual: Why David Doesn’t Get Raises, Bonuses, and Promotions: It’s Everyone Else’s Fault. He goes into tirades about how he’s “damned good at what he does” and how he’s “underappreciated” and how he “goes the extra mile every. damn. day.” Every once in a while we’ll get sprinkled in that it’s because he’s black. He fails to see that we have another co-worker who’s black and has been promoted several times (well-deserved). So today, totally fed up, and out-of-my-mind-busy, I told him, “If you worked for me, you’d have been out on your ass a long damn time ago.” He just stopped and stared at me, as if what I said was from a completely different reality (maybe it was). I got a “Hmph!” and he was gone. He went home.

The managers don’t say a damn thing because one is deathly afraid of any real confrontation and the other is scared to death of offending a militant black man.

Anyway, have you ever worked with someone like this? How would you deal with the situation, whether he’s a co-worker, subordinate or superior?

2

The instances where he points out how much he does and all those “extra miles” he goes might be a good time to say, “But when I asked you to do X the other day, you rolled eyes, argued about it, and/or didn’t give much effort.”

Lazy employees will always try to inflate how much they’re actually accomplishing - just throw it back in their faces and say, “If I don’t see improvement, we’ll have to hire somebody else.”

3

I think the facts that he’s lazy and black would be irrelevant to me; what would be relevant is that he’s boring as shit – all whiners are.

If I had management authority over him, I’d have a come-to-Jesus talk with him: “You complain that you aren’t appreciated and you aren’t promoted. The perception is that you do the bare minimum to get by, come in late and leave early, and spend all your time complaining instead of working.”

If he wasn’t my employee for supervisory purposes, I’d handle him like I handle all whiny coworkers, which is to consistently be too busy to talk to them or listen to them. I don’t want to hear how shitty your job is; I’m trying to do my own.

IOW, if he’s your problem, you’ll have to deal with him. If he’s not your problem, then you don’t owe him the time of day, much less a forum for his gripes.

4

His being black has nothing to do with it. That’s just his excuse.

If you are his supervisor, then document, document, discuss, discuss, document. If you’re not, I’m afraid there’s not a lot you can do about it, other than calling him on his complaints when appropriate.

5

In his eyes, his being black has a lot to do with it. That’s why I mentioned it.

On me, his being black has absolutely no bearing.

6

What you are supposed to do is sit him down and say something along the lines of “When I ask you to do something, I need you to do it even if you don’t think it is important.”

When he asks for extra-curricular tasks, tell him “I appreciate your offer to help out, but I need you to finish the tasks that are part of your job first.”

You might even want to throw in an “You have been at your current position for 8 years and I suspect you want to advance and be successful within this company. Here are things you are doing right and these are the areas where you need to work on before we feel comfortible advancing you.”

And maybe wrap up with a “If you feel that you are unable to meet the requirements I communicated to you, it is unlikely that you will be able to advance beyond your current role.”
Since you can’t fire this person, the best you can do is outline what is expected of them and what sort of things they need to do if they ever expect to move on to more interesting work.

What you also want to do is communicate this to both your bosses and your HR department in an email. If David continues to screw up and not perform, you should continue to document it. Document when he does well too.

Now my firm also seems to refuse to fire anyone and we tend to promote weak and passive individuals to positions of leadership. Although my boss is even more aggressive and intolerant of incompetance than I am (in a good way) we can’t even get a replacement for one of our incompetant admins. It took 9 months to fire another employee who was a drunk idiotic buffoon who never showed up to work. Bsically what we ended up doing in both cases was striping themof any tasks and responsibilities related to my work. Let the Partner deal with them when he sees they’ve billed 10 hours for the entire quarter and it affects his P&L.

7

Well, there’s fantasy and there’s reality. He’s using his race as an excuse.

8

True that.

At the place I have recently left, when I started there I had two grossly incompetent co-workers. This is/was a SECURITY job on a college campus.

1> Young Black Male, going to school for Law Enforcement, claiming to want to work with elite teams and the FBI after he graduated. (Ended up failing FOUR classes his last semester of college and not getting his degree. Karma!)

Routinely sat in a lounge watching TV on his shift. Busted four times by me, twice by the supervisor, turned in twice by faculty members - all in about six months. Known to disappear for hours at a time and turn off his radio. Sometimes turned up obviously having just woken up. Suspected of leaving campus during his shift. Did very little but walk around talking on his cell phone when he was available.

Yet this guy routinely claimed to be the best officer we ever had and claimed to be overqualified to be our boss. Seriously thought he was the greatest thing on Earth. Thought any word to the contrary was simply due to racism. Used that like a shield against being fired. Given our ultra-liberal college, IT WORKED.

2> 50-something white female. Did slightly more than #1, but not much. Had some mental health issues and even disagreeing with her was a personal attack. Had been around longer than anyone and thought this entitled her to order people around. Had been around two weeks longer than one of the Supervisors, so she claimed that she was senior to him (yeah, that worked well). She spent her nights socializing. Was given Escort duty, so she’d sit in the van staring into space, blowing off any other task.

Unfortunately, the way that she’d gotten her job was that she’d been working in the stable where the Director kept her horse. So anytime she’d feel threatened, she’d run into the Director’s office, butter her up by talking about horses, then lie her ass off about how terrible other people were being to her and how unfair it was. Sadly, our Director is/was incompetent in dealing with personnel matters.

#1 left because he finally got sick of everyone picking on him by telling him how incompetent he was. We were all a bunch of racist assholes. Good luck with the police, Mr. Incompetent. By the way, some spelling hints;

Misconduct. Not “Miss Conduct”.
Trespass. Not “Trust Passed”.

And oh yeah, I suspect that the Police Department will not find it acceptable for you to sleep on the job, sit somewhere watching TV, drive around ignoring the radio because you’re on your cell phone, or to take four fucking hours to write a one paragraph, badly spelled report.

#2 left because she was finally made to do something rather than sit in the van and when she blew a gasket, the boss didn’t want to hear it. She also made the mistake of badmouthing an old friend that the Director had known for 24 years.
Me personally, I try to get along with my co-workers, but I’m “confrontational” in that I tend to tell it like it is. I’d probably end up pissing off your co-worker on a regular basis by pointing out that he’s stuck doing stuff that ‘normal’ and ‘competent’ people moved past after a few months; by shutting him down every time he talked about being promoted by pointing out that he isn’t showing any interest in being promoted when he refuses to do anything outside his limited job responsibilities; by just plain telling him to shut the fuck up already.

9

Or you could take a different approach. I know he’s a pain in the ass - but he’s under the impression that it’s how he looks, rather than what he does that is impacting his career. I have certainly worked with people over the years who cite a litany of bias that holds them back in their career.

IF you want to help him - without either getting more involved than you’d like or overstepping your own authority, how about suggesting he find someone in the company to mentor him?

I think part of his problem is that management in their unwillingness to engage is actually failing to communicate clear expectations. So this guy is going to flounder around and blame everything except his own failure to meet expectation.