The Employee You Keep Excusing: Why the Problem Isn’t What You Think

The question is no longer whether this person can do the job. It's whether the business can trust them in the role. Those are very different questions. A talented person you can't rely on is still a problem.

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Welcome back to The Law Firm Owner Podcast. I'm so glad you're here because today, we are talking about that employee you keep explaining away. 

There is a certain kind of employee who makes you feel a little crazy. They do good work, but they create headaches. They're capable, but somehow the whole team is always quietly rearranging itself around them. And there's always a reason, always an exception, always a little more context to give you. They were sick, something came up, the timing was terrible, they meant to prepare, they meant to communicate, they meant to follow through. And because some of the work is genuinely good, you keep trying to make the problem smaller than it is.

You may have a name for the issue that you think that they bring. So you might call it an attendance or availability issue, a communication issue, a preparation issue, a rough patch they're going through. You call it something you can coach, but underneath all of those very reasonable explanations, the real issue is usually much simpler and harder to say out loud. You do not trust them anymore. The trust is broken. 

Once the trust is gone or broken, the conversation changes. And this episode is about the employee you should have let go months ago. Not because they're a bad person, not because they've never done good work, but because the business no longer trusts them in the role. And you're asking everyone around them to absorb the cost of your hesitation.

Most owners don't wait too long to fire someone because they can't see the problem. They see it. They see the missed deadlines, the last-minute emergencies, the lack of preparation. They see the way that the team routes around this person. They see the inconsistency, the gap between what this person is capable of and what the business can actually count on from them.

The problem is not a lack of evidence. The problem is that the employee keeps giving them just enough to keep the debate alive. They do good work sometimes. They have client relationships. They know the files. They have history. They're not wrong about everything, and they're not failing every single day. So the owner keeps living in the gray. And that gray zone is expensive.

The question is no longer whether this person can do the job. It's whether the business can trust them in the role. Those are very different questions. A talented person you can't rely on is still a problem. A smart person who makes everyone around them nervous or gives them anxiety because of the way they work or because of the way they don't work, it's still a problem. A productive person who generates chaos wherever they go, still a problem.

And this is where owners get stuck. They keep arguing with themselves about the parts that are working instead of telling the truth about the trust that's missing. A lot of owners stay stuck because they misname the problem. They say that this person has a certain issue, an availability issue, or they need to communicate better, or they've had a lot going on. And sometimes those things are true, but they are not the real issue. The real issue is what happens inside you and inside the team after enough of those moments pile up.

You stop assuming that they will do what they said they would do. You start checking behind them. You build backup plans as a matter of routine, and you stop being surprised when something goes sideways. You hesitate before assigning them anything important. Other people quietly prepare to cover for them without being asked to. So whatever you name the problem on the surface, that's not the problem. What is happening here is a trust issue. This is a trust problem.

There is a model for trust that I come back to a lot. I was introduced to it by Tara Gronhovd  of Align. You've seen her probably here on the podcast before. She taught me about the work of Charles Feltman. Feltman wrote a book called The Thin Book of Trust, and if you haven't read it, it's a thin book. It's worth your time. 

He breaks trust into four components: care, sincerity, reliability, and competence. Care means that you believe the other person has the interests of the people and the organization in mind, not just their own interests. Sincerity means you believe they mean what they say. They're not just telling you what you want to hear. The next one is reliability. Reliability means you can count on them to do what they said they would do when they said they would do it. And then the last pillar of trust is competence, and competence means you trust their judgment and their ability to actually execute in the role.

Now, all four of these pillars matter, and when any one of them breaks or breaks down, you feel it, even if you can't name it yet. 

In these situations, the pillar that we're talking about in this episode, the pillars that tend to fracture first are reliability and competence. And what makes it particularly hard is that they compound on each other. When someone is unreliable long enough, you eventually start questioning their competence too, or their level of care, not because they are incapable, but because capability that cannot be counted on does not actually help the business. 

So the owner ends up pointing at the surface, the late call, the missed deadline, the dropped ball, when what they are actually experiencing is a breakdown of trust. And they are living downstream of it. The specific incident isn't the problem. It is evidence of the problem, but it's not the problem. 

I have been in conversations where I ask the owner, there's lots of conversation about this person, and I will ask the owner, “Do you trust this person in the role?” And there's a pause and something shifts for them because they had been managing the symptoms for so long that they stopped naming what was underneath the symptoms, the real problem at hand now.

That one question, “Do you trust this person in the role?” reframes everything because once you name it as a trust problem, you stop trying to coach your way out of something that cannot be coached. You stop waiting for one more piece of evidence. You stop living in the gray. 

Why do owners wait? This is where smart owners get themselves tied into knots. They don't wait because the employee is so convincing that they should stay. They wait because firing the person forces them to confront what they actually believe about the business. And that sounds dramatic. I really spent time on this episode. I do not think that's dramatic.

When you finally let someone go, especially someone who has been around a while or who did real work for you at some point, you have to face a set of fears that often have nothing to do with that employee at all. Maybe no one better will want to work here. We're too small. We're not solid enough of a firm to attract better. Maybe this is just what managing people is. Maybe I'm being too demanding. Maybe I didn't set them up well enough. Maybe I should be more forgiving. Maybe replacing them is going to be worse than what I'm dealing with right now. Maybe I'm the problem. Maybe we're not the kind of firm that can have the higher standards that you hear about. 

I mean, this is the trap. The employee problem becomes a mirror for the owner's self-doubt. And instead of making the decision from standards, the owner starts making the decision from fear and doubt. So they collect more evidence. They spend time doing that. They keep doing it. That an incident comes and they wait for another incident. They decide to have one more conversation.

How many one more conversations have you had? They decide to give one more chance. How many one more chances have you given? They tell themselves that they are being fair by doing this. But at some point, fairness to one person becomes unfair to everyone else, including your clients, by the way. 

Your team knows when someone is not carrying their weight. They know when someone keeps getting exceptions made for them. They know when standards are not being applied consistently. They know when you are tolerating something you would not tolerate from everyone. And every day you do not act, you are staying neutral. You are setting a standard. It just may not be the one that you intended to set.

And let's talk about what the team is already absorbing. This is the part owners more consistently underestimate. When you keep someone you do not trust, the team pays for it. They pay in extra work. They pay in uncertainty, in resentment. They probably will never say out loud. And they learn something about how this firm operates, that standards are flexible if someone is talented enough or senior enough or loud enough or just difficult enough to replace. 

The owner often thinks that they're protecting the team by avoiding the disruption of a termination. What they usually do not realize is that the team has been living with the disruption for a long time already. They've already adjusted. They've already noticed. They've already lost some trust in the situation and sometimes in you. And that is why when the owner finally acts, the team is almost never shocked. In fact, they are oftentimes relieved. 

Even if you're listening to this and you're saying, well, my team, they may not be as shocked as I think, but they wouldn't feel relief. You do not know that. I cannot tell you the number of times that I've talked to clients, and when they finally make the call and then they talk to their team, that is what they hear every single time. And that can be uncomfortable to sit with because it reveals something the owner already knew. The problem was deeper and more visible than they wanted to admit.

Now, this is not about trying to call you out and creating shame. It's just trying to be honest and tell the truth. Your team does not need you to be perfect. They need you to see what is actually happening, and they need you to respond to it. 

There is one more layer here that's worth naming and saying out loud. Sometimes, an owner keeps the wrong person because they're still running the business through an old lens. Now hear me out. I run into this all the time. They remember and they're living from when hiring was harder, when the firm felt less established, those times when they were just genuinely grateful to have someone say yes and they wanted the job and they showed up to work to help.

They remember earlier seasons, really just before what you've built now, right? Before the team, before the clients that you have now, before the systems you now have in place, before the reputation that you have worked really hard to build. That's where they're living from. And even when the business has genuinely changed, the owner's identity never caught up. 

So here is what is true for a lot of the owners that I have the privilege of working with. They've built something real, a small firm that is run very intentionally. It's not perfect, but no place is perfect. It's run intentionally, and that makes it a better place to work than most people will ever experience. The culture is real, the work is meaningful, the people who fit here, they know they fit here. But if you are still operating from the identity of the early days, you can't see any of that very clearly. You see the firm as you were, not the firm as you are, and not the opportunity of what you have to step into.

And when your identity is stuck in an earlier version of the firm, you make decisions from that older, smaller story. And that outdated picture of yourself and of the firm is exactly what keeps you tolerating things that are handicapping your business.

If you secretly believe, we are lucky anyone good wants to work here, you will hold on too long. If you believe, I don't know that we can do better, you will keep proving yourself right. If you believe, and when I say believe, this may just be a whisper inside, but if there is something inside that says, this is just what we get, you're going to build a team around exceptions instead of standards.

But if you tell the truth about the business you've actually built, the real one, not the version from five years ago, the decision looks different. Listen, you are allowed to have standards. You are allowed to expect reliability. You are allowed to require competence. You are allowed to say, this isn't working anymore. And that doesn't make you harsh, it makes you clear. It makes you the owner.

So how do you know when it's time to make the call? One question will cut through the noise. Do you trust this person in this role? The question should not be, do they sometimes do good work? No. The question shouldn't be around inconvenience. Like, would this be inconvenient if I let this person go? No, that's not the right question. That's not a high-quality question. You also don't want to ask yourself if you can explain why this is happening, because it's not the first time. You've asked yourself that. You don't want to consider do you feel bad about it? That's irrelevant. That's feelings, not facts.

If the answer is no to the trust question, I want to be clear about this because I think people get freaked out. It doesn't always mean that the next step is termination. It might mean a harder conversation than you've been willing to have. It might mean a clear accountability structure with a real timeline where expectations are explicit, the stakes are named, and you both are clear on what happens if things do not change.

And sometimes that conversation is the thing that turns it around. But something has to happen. The one thing that's not on the table is continuing to absorb it because if you have that conversation, the real one, not the soft version that you've been having, and nothing changes, then you have your answer. And at that point, the decision's not hard. You already made it. You just have to follow through with it. 

And if the answer is no to that trust question, and you need to act, do it carefully. Legal guidance, documentation, a plan. Get your ducks in a row. That's all real. Those are all logistics steps and it's all worth doing. But don't confuse the logistics with the decision. The decision is about trust. The logistics are about execution. Owners get into trouble when they use logistics as a reason to delay the decision. Those are not the same thing.

Well, let's say you do everything we've already talked about in this episode. You actually did have the hard conversation. Maybe that meant that it led to a path where they fixed it, or maybe that meant that they were released back into the world to go find another job that may suit them better.

Either way, there is a particular relief that comes after you finally make the decision you already knew you needed to make. And not because, you know, firing's not fun. And not because the person is a villain. They're usually not. The relief comes because you stop fighting your own judgment. You stop managing around a problem you already diagnosed. You stop asking the team to carry a cost that was never theirs to carry. And you stop letting your self-doubt run this firm.

And then something shifts. You hire differently. You interview differently. You evaluate differently. You stop selling the firm short. You stop being grateful for anyone who can do part of the job. You start building around the standards the business actually needs. The firing is one moment. The bigger shift is the owner, is you, waking up to the business they are actually responsible for leading.

If you are listening to this and someone came to mind, pay attention to that. Something in you may already know what your calendar, your spreadsheets, your very reasonable rationalizations have been working overtime to talk you out of. This is not about being unforgiving. It is not about being cold. It is not about pretending that people can't have a hard season. This is about trust and standards and the cost of asking the rest of your team to absorb what you are unwilling to decide.

The hard conversation is hard. But the slow erosion dismantles what you have built, the team, the culture, the standards. So make the call.

Hey, want to watch the video of this episode? Head over to Velocity Work’s YouTube channel. You’ll find the link in the show notes.

You may not know this, but there's a free guide for a process I teach called Monday Map Friday Wrap. If you go to velocitywork.com, it's all yours. It's about how to plan your time and honor your plans so that week over week, more work that moves the needle is getting done in less time. Go to velocitywork.com to get your free copy.

Thank you for listening to The Law Firm Owner Podcast. If you're ready to get clearer on your vision, data, and mindset, then head over to VelocityWork.com where you can plug in to quarterly Strategic Planning, with accountability and coaching in between. This is the work that creates Velocity.