Breaking an Employee's Heart

Breaking an Employee's Heart

How do you tell a good employee that his/her capabilities just aren’t what he/she thinks they are?

Everyone has this image of themselves, ascribing to themselves all sorts of capabilities and qualities. People get so invested in their images, that it would break their hearts if they found out they weren’t as good as they thought they were.

The director of my company’s foreign language translation services is a wonderful linguist. He, literally, takes every word he writes very seriously, and thinks carefully before he speaks or writes a sentence. (As you can imagine, that makes meetings agonizingly long.)
He’s a wonderful employee and I couldn’t have started the company without him.
BUT, he’s not a people-person. He’s more like an engineer that sits in front of a computer monitor all day and analyzes the data on the screen - occasionally raising his hand to the keyboard to change “then” to “than” or “too” to “two.”

Fortunately, everyone he supervises, is just like him. They all sit in front their monitors, staring as words roll up the screen. Occasionally, a lonely voice will call out, “What’s the Spanish equivalent for ‘A penny for your thoughts?’” or “How do you say isosceles triangle in Vietnamese?”

As an aside I have to say, that everyone in that department prefers to work with the lights off, and the only illumination in their long and narrow office is from the computers. So, when you enter, all you see is this gauntlet of computer monitors with shadowy figures nodding their heads when they satisfyingly insert just the right word into that Spanish, or Chinese or Russian sentence. I call it, “The Dark Side,” and I don’t go over there often.

So, can you imagine my surprise when he and I are sitting at Starbucks going over projects, and he suddenly chimes in with, “I appreciate the fact that you’ve given me the opportunity to rise from proofreader to the head of the Translation Department, however, I’ve basically been doing the same job for 15 years and I’m bored out of my mind. I’d like to transfer to sales.”
And, he reveals that, unbeknownst to me, he’s been taking sales training classes at the local adult education school, and the teacher says he has lots of potential.

In response, I hem-and-haw, and squirm and mumble.

In Dr. Spock-like fashion, he lays out his argument for his being able to move into sales.

First, I’ve trusted him to head the Translation Department so I must have had faith in his ability to manage people. (I’m thinking, yes, people like you. But our clients aren’t like you.)

Second, his staff comes to him when they are they ill or have family commitments that will take them away from the office, which he interprets as people are willing to confide in him. (I interpret it as, they need time off from work and they have to ask if they don’t want to lose their jobs.)

Third, he conducts the annual performance reviews for his department, and he says that the discussions are always “meaningful,” again proving that he has strong interpersonal skills. (I hate to burst his bubble and tell him that most conversations about money are meaningful.)

Anyway, I’m forced to make some vague commitment about including him in client meetings, and that satisfies him for the moment. I’m hoping the whole subject is forgotten, but like a child, he can’t let it go.

Around then, a client calls because they’re not happy with our services and are thinking about switching to another translation company. Basically, it’s a small advertising agency populated with Gen-Yers and they don’t think our translations are “trendy” or “cool.”

So, I figure, this is it. I’ll give him a chance to meet a client, and at the same time, they’ll see how serious we are about the quality of our work. All will end well, and it’s a win-win situation all around.

Well, the meeting is a disaster. The trendy and cool Gen-Yers who head up the ad agency can’t relate to my Engineer of Words, and they give their business to a competitor. I think, “that’s the way it goes, we gave it a shot.” Unfortunately, he blames himselfs and retreats into his corner of the Dark Side, rarely to be seen again.

My win-win situation turns into lose-lose.

And I think to myself, maybe if I had just been honest with him, I’d still have a committed employee and an ad agency for a client.

Mon dieu.

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Jack Bernstein is the author of seven books on business and president of, The Translation Station, a foreign language translation company. Send comments to him at: Jack@TheTranslationStation.com
Copyright 2008, Jack Bernstein