Ask a Manager: Is Our Intern Clueless or a Con Artist?

[minoanmiss]

I am a mid-level engineer at a small (70-80 employees) tech company. We frequently host undergrad interns from a local university. Some were during the summer, and some were during the school year. These were all paid, full-time internships that lasted for 12 weeks.

The past interns all had a great attitude and work ethic, and there were no issues with any of them. However, the most recent intern I’m managing is demonstrating an alarming pattern of behavior, which is causing me to question his integrity. I am having a hard time differentiating whether he is acting maliciously, or whether he is simply clueless about professional norms.


• Apparently falsifying his time sheet. He retroactively edited an already-submitted time sheet from several weeks ago, adding an extra six hours. When I emailed him to ask for an explanation, he never answered.

• Under the state’s labor law, the company was forced to pay him an extra seven hours, because he committed meal break violations (logging an excessively short break, or no break at all, due to allegedly reading emails during lunch) on seven separate days. These infractions happened despite HR having several talks with him about the matter. The HR lady sent me an exasperated email that he has committed more time sheet violations than all the past interns combined, and that she “simply cannot see why he doesn’t get it.”

• Several times, he showed up on a day he was not scheduled to work, after learning that lunch was provided at an on-site seminar. He barged into the conference room halfway through the seminar, grabbed a ton of food, and left a few minutes later.

• The week before Christmas, two of the company’s founders (President and CTO) treated a different department to lunch each day. When it was our turn, everyone ordered a $14 to $17 lunch entree and one alcoholic beverage. My intern ordered a $50 ribeye steak from the dinner menu and 2 alcoholic beverages. Our founders are some of the most patient, kind, and tolerant individuals I’ve ever known (almost to the point of being doormats), so they didn’t react in any way

• During the first week of his internship, the HR lady invited him to take a T-shirt and sweatshirt as part of onboarding. He ended up taking nearly half of the shirts in the pile, causing a lot of other employees to miss out.

I am perplexed by this intern’s audacity. On one hand, someone who intends to exploit, rip off, and take advantage of others would not make their behavior this obvious. But on the other hand, the sheer frequency of incidents tells me that these are not accidental. Is this intern a true con artist, or just innocently clueless about how to conduct himself in a professional environment? I honestly cannot tell.

I don’t see any signs he’s a con artist — he just sounds like he’s clueless and has bad manners.


It doesn’t really matter though, since either way the solution for you is the same: talk to him, lay out clear expectations, and consider ending his internship early if the problems continue.

One thing that stands out in your letter is that it doesn’t sound like anyone has talked to him in a serious way about any of these issues, other than HR trying to address the meal break problem. You emailed him about the time sheet, but you can’t just stop at “he never answered.” One day after not getting an answer (two at the most), it’s time to follow up with an in-person conversation to find out what’s going on.

The thing about interns is that they’re there in part to learn work norms, and your role is in part to teach them.

That’s not to say that he’s blameless. He’s behaved rudely on multiple occasions, been unresponsive about work questions, and ignored what I’m assuming were clear instructions from HR. You’re right to note that other interns haven’t had the same problems — he is clearly on the far end of the “inexperienced and it shows” spectrum, and it’s quite possible that he’s just not suited for the role. It’s just that it’s premature to conclude that when you haven’t yet sat down with him and addressed the issues.

Ideally you would have been giving feedback all along, as each incident happened. For example, when he took half the t-shirts that were intended for a larger group, ideally you would have talked to him that day, explained others needed them too and they were one per employee, and had him return the extras. (Frankly, the HR person herself should have done that in the moment when he was grabbing them!) Or, at your department lunch, someone could have said discreetly right in the moment, “We’re ordering from the lunch menu” or talked to him afterwards to explain social norms when you’re being treated at an event like that. Similarly, with the lunch break incidents, once it was clear he was repeatedly ignoring instructions, it was time for a serious conversation about the pattern: “We’ve addressed this repeatedly and it’s still happening. What’s going on?”

To be fair, it’s understandable that no one has been speaking up in the moment in some of these situations, like while everyone was ordering lunch or while he was in mid-grab with the t-shirts. When someone is violating the social contract in those ways, it can be hard to know know how to react on the spot! But as a manager, once you have time to process what happened, you’ve got to follow up with a conversation about it — especially when the behavior isn’t an out-of-character one-off but an ongoing pattern, and definitely any time something is making you question someone’s integrity.

So! Sit down with this intern and have a serious conversation. Explain that you’ve seen issues that concern you and that you want to address, and talk about all of this. The time sheet issue needs to be addressed on two fronts — the reason for the change (and whether it was legit) and his ignoring your question about it. The lunch break stuff is serious too, and you should go into the conversation knowing what consequences you’re willing to impose for that. (For example, do you want to have him work fewer hours this week to make up for it? Is it a firing offense if he keeps doing it? With an intern, and especially with this intern, it probably should be and you should let him know that.)

From there, see what happens — and keep actively coaching him meanwhile. If he learns from the feedback, great. If he doesn’t, you can reconsider keeping him on. As you do that, you should balance how much guidance and oversight he needs against how much time you have to provide it, as long as you allow for the fact that it’s normal for him to need more than a non-intern would. And certainly if you see clear integrity problems (like if he outright lied on his time sheet), you don’t need to keep coaching and can move straight to ending his internship.

But start by having a real conversation with him.

Comments

[jadelennox]

when I was a broke new grad I would absolutely sneak into meetings to snarf free food, but would also reflexively order the cheapest thing on the menu in all settings where there were prices, no matter who was paying them. and yeah on bread, when we used to order dinner on the company dime we'd order a huge bag of rolls and eat them for lunch for days.