Several months ago, my friend and client Bill called me to complain about his employee Dave. Bill said he was fed up with Dave and wanted to fire him right away. I asked Bill to send me a copy of the file he had on Dave.
Unfortunately, Dave's personnel file was pretty slim. Dave was hired about three and a half years ago, and there were two performance evaluations in his file, the most recent of which was six months old. It showed that Dave's manager gave him a consistent 7 or 8 on a 10-point scale. There was no other disciplinary information in Dave's file.
I told Bill, "I don't think you should fire Dave yet. There's nothing in his file but two evaluations indicating no problems." Bill went on a tirade about Dave's faults. "He's lazy. He doesn't care about his work or my customers or how we look when he screws up. I can't motivate him. He is a constant disappointment and a pain in my @#%."
"Bill, are you trying to tell me that Dave sucks?" I asked.
I explained to Bill that Dave is one of the LUZIRS = Lazy, Uninspired, Zero-interest, Irresponsible, Rude, Slacker. Then I gave Bill the bad news: "If you fire Dave now, he may sue you claiming some discriminatory reason for the termination or that it simply isn't fair because you never warned him or told him he was a problem employee and you never gave him a chance to improve. While you would probably win that case if we can prove how bad Dave is, it will still cost you a fortune in legal fees and expenses just to prove that you're right. Worse, there is a risk that because there's nothing in writing, we may still lose."
The real problem here is that although Dave is clearly one of the LUZIRS, he was not managed well or evaluated properly. This happens all the time, especially when employers use numerical evaluation forms that let supervisors and managers simply circle a number without providing meaningful feedback during the evaluation process. It is human nature for managers and supervisors to want to avoid conflict if possible, so when asked to evaluate Dave it is no surprise that they circle 7 or 8 on the form. The reality is that managers don't want to sit across the table from Dave and tell him, "Dave, you suck. You're not doing the job we hired you for well at all, and here's why . . . " If management had consistently done this with Dave, we could probably have fired him without a problem long ago.