Submitted by jg407 on
in
Forums
Hello all!
I am in a very small company, 11 people, and 6 of them directly report to myself and my supervisor. I take on more of the management / development role though there is really no system of doing this internally. That is why i turned to MT and have learned so much. I try to implement as much as I can but being a performing manager in a company that doesnt seem to put much stock into these principles, makes it difficult.
Anyways, the reason for my post is that i have one employee who is the only employee in a "branch" location. He is a computer technician/engineer and has been with the company 3 years. Regardless of my push over the past years to help him to make himself better (even telling him it will make him more marketable for the next job) he doesnt seem to take any initiative. Part of me thinks he is lazy, which is fairly easily corrected with some structured coaching and goals i'm sure, but part of me thinks he realizes that as the one guy in a branch office where we have no sales people and no prospecting occuring (much to my chagrin) he is just realizing that improving himself will not yield anything at this company. I cant promote him, cant justify pay increases because he is not productive enough (because we are not selling into his market) and am at a loss.
My better judgement says to coach him into finding another job, but then that leads to major stress for me as we do have clients to service in his area and finding a replacement would be a major pain (especially since i'm having so many problems recruiting here at the home office where all the activity is actually going on).
Has anyone had experiences like this, both trying to inject management structure into a place where there really isnt any, trying to do this while being responsible to be a performing manager and/or trying to coach/develop someone who you know has no chance of upward mobility inside the company?
I know this is kind of 3 posts in one, so i apologize if its a bit long winded but i greatly appreciate this forum and any insight you may be able to provide to get me thinking/moving in the right direction.
Thanks!
JG