You can watch this Meme Lesson on Feedback on YouTube.
There's a person on your team who shouldn't be on your team. You've known for months. And instead of deciding, you're promoting them.
Usually, the people we need to get off our teams are not bad. not lazy. Just — if you're honest, which you mostly aren't — they are just in the wrong seat, or on the wrong level, or are suited for a career that was never quite going to be this one.
You have known this for months.
You have not done anything about it.
What you have done instead is give them feedback.
Enormous amounts of it.
Feedback in every 1:1.
Feedback in the margins of documents.
Feedback over coffee that was not really about coffee.
All carefully worded.
All developmentally framed.
All signed off with Let me know how I can support you in this journey.
You are very proud of how thoughtful you are being.
The feedback is not failing to work. The feedback is working exactly as designed.
It is, and always was, a substitute for the decision you are not making.
Every growth-area conversation is a decision you have not had to make that afternoon.
Every development plan is a termination you have not had to initiate.
Every "let's see how things go next quarter" is another three months where the problem remains theoretically solvable and you remain blameless for not solving it.
HR professionals who have watched this happen for twenty years have a name for it.
Death by coaching.
The employee, meanwhile, is doing what employees do.
Taking the feedback seriously.
Working harder.
Performing a slightly more effortful version of themselves each week, trying to meet whatever invisible bar you keep describing.
The bar does not exist.
The bar was never the point. The point was to give you something to say in the 1:1 so you did not have to say the other thing.
This ends one of two ways.
Either you finally have the conversation — and they ask, with reasonable fury, why nobody told them where they stood.
You did tell them weekly, but in a form so wrapped in development language that nobody could have reasonably interpreted it as your job is at risk.
Or they quit first, because people who are being quietly developed for fourteen months without progress eventually work out what is actually happening.
Either way, the person who looks worst at the end is not them.
If they should be promoted, promote them.
If they should be moved, move them.
If they should be let go, let them go.
If you are not sure, that is a real question — but the answer will not be found inside another 1:1.
It is found in a room with your own manager, or HR, or a glass of something strong on a Thursday evening.
Not in front of them.
They already know something is wrong.
They have known for months.
What they do not know is what you have decided.
And the reason they do not know is that you have not decided anything.
Decide.
