Ask a Manager: I Feel Terrible Performance-Managing An Octogenarian

[minoanmiss]

I have a long-time employee who I’ll call Joe. I’ve been his line manager for the last five years or so.


Before my time, Joe expressed a desire to wind down to retirement. The organization supported that with a part-time arrangement which went on for several years — well past Joe hitting and sailing past the usual age of retirement. Unfortunately, upper management then removed our ability to offer part-time work and when given the choice to retire or come back full-time, Joe elected to come back full-time. At the time we were fine with that — he was a good operator.

However, in the last few years Joe has been experiencing health issues. It has slowed him down considerably and changed his attitude to work. Despite many many months of meeting regularly and trying to communicate (gently and then increasingly bluntly) that he needs to do the job more efficiently, the timeliness of his delivery has not improved. If anything, it’s gotten worse. I estimate that I’m getting less work from him now than when he was working part-time despite my best efforts at managing and supporting him.

His attitude toward me and our organizational leadership has deteriorated too. His attitude has moved from positive and constructive to using every opportunity to deliver long-winded lectures about “in his day” and lectures about outdated management practices and how I, my boss, and upper management are not doing our jobs well. He has completely lost the ability to communicate concisely about projects and issues, and people turn off when he talks.

I’m now getting pushback from other staff, upper management, and outside stakeholders who no longer want to work with him because he wastes their time and doesn’t deliver. People have stopped answering his calls.

I have been having conversations about the need for improved, timely outcomes and his communication style with Joe for some time. I have given him a middle of the road workload with clear deliverables but he’s dawdling when we need him to deliver. When I started to ask for the deliverables by specific dates, he complained of stress and anxiety.

Given the nature of his ongoing health issues and the respect I have for his stage of life (now 80s) and historical performance, I am loath to go down a performance management/PIP route lest I literally kill him, but this isn’t fair on the rest of the team who are delivering and pushing out higher volumes of work.

He has said, in response to a frank conversation about retirement, that he can’t do the active things he wanted to due to his health, so he can’t see the point in retiring — he’d be bored.

What can I do here? Do I just need to performance manage him officially even if it worsens his health? It feels like an ignoble end to a long and overwhelming high performing career. On the other hand, I can’t in good conscience let him stay and under deliver when he has no plans of retiring just so he isn’t bored. (In case you’re wondering, Joe is financially comfortable and that is not a factor in the retirement question.)

Is there a solution I’m not seeing? I feel awful about how this might have to end.

Why not have a very frank conversation with Joe about the situation? That’s the most respectful approach and gives him the most control of the situation, while still being firm about what you need.

You could sit down with him and say, “I have an enormous amount of respect for your work here historically, but as we’ve talked about several times lately, you haven’t been hitting the bar we need in your role. Because of the seriousness of the issues, we’re at the point where we’ll need to start a formal improvement plan, and if I don’t see XYZ from you in the next X weeks, I would need to let you go. However, since you had talked about retirement in the past, I wanted to touch base with you and see what makes sense to you. I would much rather see you leave on your own terms, but otherwise I’m at the point where I do need to begin the PIP process.”

That way, he knows where things stand and it’s up to him. If he seems unsure about how to proceed, you say, “I’m happy to give you a chance to pursue the PIP option if you want to — and if you choose that path, I’ll of course try my best to help you succeed — but I would hate for it to turn your experience here sour. I would much rather work together on a transition that meets your needs and ours.”

And then respect Joe’s choice, whatever it is. As part of that, I think you need to get away from the fear that putting him on a PIP will kill him. Joe’s a competent and financially comfortable adult who will have options and agency in this situation. It’s okay to be honest (be kind too, of course, but that’s not specific to his age). In fact, I’d argue that if you want to help him preserve his dignity, that necessarily includes not coddling him because of his age — and does require intervening at this point.

I’m actually a fan of this approach in lots of situations where you’re convinced that a PIP or other progressive discipline process won’t lead to the significant improvement that you need. Rather than dragging the person through a process that’s unlikely to end in success, having an honest conversation and giving them a voice in how to proceed can be a kinder (and more effective) approach. (To be clear, though, if the person picks the PIP route, you should be sincere in your willingness to give them a chance to show they can improve.)

Comments

[tielan]

There seems to be a fair bit of "I can't retire this employee, it would kill them!" in a number of these letters - even when the person is financially stable.

Like, I understand that some people get bored in retirement because they've never learned to do anything outside of work, but this whole idea that "omg, the WORST THING that I could ever do to someone is to force them to take time off" is just plain weird to me.

[castiron]

Yeah, "It would kill them because they would end up starving on the street" is one thing; "it would kill them because they have no other meaning in their life" is not the manager's problem to solve. I think about my dad, who has health issues that limit some of his retirement activities and knows it's only going to get worse, but who still keeps himself thoroughly busy and has an active social life outside Mom. He could give this guy a lesson if said guy were willing to listen.

I am likely to be working for as long as I'm physically and mentally able to because I won't be able to afford to retire, but if the numbers do work out to where I can retire while I'm still able to work, I'll certainly be able to do other things -- crafts, or genealogy, or reading, or music, or improv, or volunteering.

[purlewe]

I work for a law firm. A bunch of the old man lawyers never retire (oohh but those woman lawyers.. OH yes they definitely do) They come in every day. So that means we have to keep prime offices for them. We can't give them to anyone rising up thru the ranks. They INSIST on being first, on being important when they no longer take cases or clients. The have "lunch with the boys" where a bunch of them gather together so they can basically talk sportsball. They use up space and resources, bring in very little "work", and NONE of them have hobbies. And frankly it promotes the old boys club that DEI has been trying to break up. But they come, every day, to get out of their house. I assume their wives don't want them at home bc THEY HAVE NO HOBBIES and they bother them as much as they bother us. If we could we would bar them from coming in bc we could use the space, the resources, the room to expand. But we can't bc they are octogenarians with power.

This sounds like an octogenarian with no power??? like a staff member? and if that is true and they aren't getting work done then I say they need to either figure out if they can reconfigure their job for them AND petition the business to allow part time work. (There is no reason everyone needs to be full time. They could contract him for half time. They could change his duties to only include things he can do. If they REALLY need to have Joe keep working they could give him smaller pieces of work.) I find the idea that EVERYONE must be full time ludicrous. We have plenty of part timers who only come in for tax season. They do half day work for 3 months and then we don't see them again until next February.

[green_grrl]

They INSIST on being first, on being important when they no longer take cases or clients.
Wow, I don’t get this at all. I thought that lawyers had to produce clients/billing in order to be part of a firm, and the more money they brought in, the higher their rank. It sounds like what these guys need is a “club” at the firm—a nice space where they can hang out, but also be on call for case advice or mentoring.

[oursin]

When I retired, I was longest-serving-but-one member of staff, and the general feeling was that longest-serving would only leave feet-first, having been found one morning collapsed on the floor of the stacks containing the greatest gems of the collection they were curator of.

[minoanmiss]

having been found one morning collapsed on the floor of the stacks containing the greatest gems of the collection they were curator of.

That would make for a glorious dramatic moment in a book but must have been extremely unfun for everyone to live through.

[oursin]

Yes, it's all very well saying 'that's the way they would have liked to go': what about everyone else?
(Quite apart from that thing of having somebody stuck at the top curating a collection which could, just saying, be doing with a little new blood.)

[laurajv]

I'm...not convinced that Joe isn't experiencing cognitive decline, which often goes along with health problems at his age. I read this and felt kind of -- frozen -- because this sounds exactly like my father-in-law 4 years ago, which is just before he had a terrible accident at work caused by not following a safety procedure he'd known and followed faithfully since the early 1960s, because he just...forgot. (Granted, his work was more dangerous than office work.)