My Employees Are Incompetent

If you’re reading this, you’re likely a hardworking leader who does great work and has a great work ethic. You’ve risen through the ranks by managing effectively, coaching employees and learning how to become a strong leader. Despite your success, however, you’re running into a roadblock: the new set of employees you’re managing are entirely incompetent. No matter how hard you push them, they don’t seem to be able to perform the tasks required to move your business forward. 

In response, you retreat to your lone-wolf state. In order to keep things afloat, you take up more work, bear additional responsibilities and generally pick up slack around the office. This is natural to you. It’s how you got to be a leader in the first place. And while it works — you’re able to effectively cover for your employees — it’s starting to run you ragged. You’re getting angry and frustrated, and you’re not managing as effectively.  

Sound familiar? If you’re currently in this tough leadership predicament, don’t worry. There are ways to work with incompetent employees to improve their skills, but they require mindfulness, inspiration and creativity. Keep reading to learn how to break the “incompetent employee cycle” and move toward a workplace culture that’s productive and efficient. 

What are incompetent employees?

What does an incompetent employee situation look like? Here’s one example. Let’s say you’re managing a group of employees who just don’t take initiative, and no amount of strong-arming seems to be solving the problem. They’re failing at their day-to-day responsibilities, and they seem disengaged. In response, you’re pushing the “employee bus” down the road instead of starting the engine and letting the employees drive themselves. Whether that’s because of their inability to drive the bus or your inability to let go, you’re not getting anywhere.   

In the end, you end up feeling stuck and upset. You thought that your leadership position would allow you to make an even greater impact at the company. But in the end, you’re actually making less of an impact than you did in your previous position, because the work isn’t getting done. 

Signs of incompetent employees

In order to understand how and why your employees are behaving incompetently, you have to really dig deep and look at their beliefs. How are these employees thinking? What do they believe to be true? What makes it hard for them to engage in meaningful tasks? And what’s really getting in the way of their success?

An incompetent employee usually holds a series of beliefs that make managing them difficult. If an employee has the fundamental belief that they don’t have the intelligence or skillset to achieve their goals, chances are they’re not going to try very hard at that task. Think about it: if you’re not good at technical problems, and something goes wrong with your computer, do you try to fix it yourself? Or do you head over to the IT help desk and ask one of your IT workers to look into it for you?

This is how most incompetent employees think about the way that they work. They hold sets of beliefs — conscious or unconscious — that make them less inclined to continuously improve themselves, look for new opportunities, and help the company succeed. 

How to deal with incompetent employees

When it comes to incompetent employees, some managers throw up their hands and proceed to complain about their performance before taking disciplinary measures. Unfortunately, that doesn’t actually solve the problem. In fact, it makes it worse: by getting frustrated with employees and threatening your team to perform better, they’ll become increasingly discouraged and uninspired — until they either quit or get fired. 

So, if you really want to be a great leader and help your team perform, it’s not enough to simply tell your team what to do. When managing, it’s important for you to take note of and understand how your employees think. You’ll need to help them think in ways that allow them to reach their goals as well as yours. So, what does that really mean for you as a leader?

At the end of the day, in order to be a good leader, you need to work with a great coach. 

Coaching employees

How do you start coaching employees? It starts by being coached yourself. By engaging with a coaching program that allows you to reexamine your own conscious and unconscious beliefs, you’ll be better prepared to understand how to work with difficult employees. In fact, after receiving coaching, you might not even find your employees “difficult” at all. You’ll start asking important questions that get at the root of their behaviors. 

Because that’s what struggling to perform usually revolves around. It’s not usually related to skill, talent or experience. In truth, it’s almost always related to employee beliefs that impact their behaviors. Once you start contemplating what some of the beliefs your employees hold that prevent them from performing consistently and accurately, you’ll be on the right track to inspiring your workers to succeed. 

But in order to ask the right questions and uncover those deeper employee beliefs, you’ll need to be guided by your own personal coach. After all, how can you succeed at coaching employees if you haven’t gone through the coaching process yourself?

What is the process for coaching employees?

Here’s an exercise you can perform with your workers once you’ve gone through coaching: after identifying an employee belief that’s not serving them, question them directly. Ask them “is this what you believe?” And if they say yes, ask “does this belief allow you to reach your goal with ease?” In most cases, they’ll say no. In those instances, ask them if there are other possibilities within reach. Could they believe something else that might help them reach their goal with greater ease?

What you’re doing is diminishing the impact of a strong negative belief and replacing it with a strong positive belief that serves your employees better. That, in turn, will lead to greater efficiency and competence.

That’s just one way to approach incompetent employees from a coaching perspective. Curious about other ideas and strategies? For more employee workplace solutions like this, check out our coaching program. You can also tune into our coaching podcast to learn more about how to effectively manage employees.