My Company Won’t Fire My Terribly Incompetent Coworker

A reader writes:

I am the lead of a team of three. We are supportive leaders for a team of 100, but also support other managers and leaders who oversee a large staff as our department is interwoven throughout the company.

Due to budget cuts, the other two team members — Taylor and Sam — were told their positions would be reassigned to a lower-level team with lower pay.

Taylor is terribly incompetent. She has had the most years of experience in this role at this company, but constantly needs job coaching and our support to do basic functions of the role, including responding to emails, creating reports and training documents, and working with other departments.

Sam, who is excellent at the job and a true leader, started looking for another job and found one. To save money, Sam will not be replaced.

HR has been vague for months about what will happen to Taylor, although it has been clear that she will be demoted to a lower level position due to the budget cuts. I will continue in the lead role, but am currently on FMLA with a new baby. I return in about six weeks.

My boss, Cori, told me that Taylor will keep her job, despite being horrible at it. She was vague, but said that we need to find tasks Taylor can handle. I truly cannot think of any task that she can do independently. Sam and I have tried giving her direct tasks, but she will find them too difficult and then ask for our help, so we end up doing the work or redoing it afterwards. Or, she will try to come up with completely different, unrelated, or untimely projects as a way to “show initiative,” but the timely and pressing work is overlooked and doesn’t get done. She also will start working on something such as a Powerpoint or spreadsheet, but not know the goal for the document. She will then meet with us, show us what she made, and ask us what the goal could be for the document or what it could be used for.

Additionally, we will agree as a team, including our boss, Cori, about company guidance, and Taylor will respond to questions about this guidance with completely incorrect information. The wider company thinks our department is awful because of this constant miscommunication.

Most egregiously, Taylor posted confidential information to our company’s staff Google Drive for anyone to see, even those who do not have the training or credentials to see it. The information is already available on the secure portal to those who have the credentials and training necessary. I found this after I started this job only a few months ago, and realized the information had been publicly available for over a year. When asked about it, she realized her mistake and cried significantly. It must be said, Taylor is in charge of this confidential material and organizes the signed confidentiality agreements for all those involved. It’s her job to keep the info confidential, and this is her third year doing it. She doesn’t possess the critical thinking skills and ability to keep the info confidential. Cori was frustrated but due to wider company concerns, did not report this breech to the state entity that oversees our company or the company that creates the confidential material.

Recently, I learned that Taylor does not have the correct license in our state to do this work. She applied for it years ago and was denied. She can reapply and update it, which she is now working on. Apparently HR was unaware of this license issue.

I have been shocked that Taylor gets to keep her leadership role, as she is incapable of leading and is simply incompetent.

As Sam was leaving the company, she told me that Taylor divulged some time ago that she has a mental health diagnosis. I looked this up and it is protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Taylor’s parent is a business law attorney in the area. I believe that Taylor cannot be fired due to this mental health disability and her attorney parent is telling her what to say and do to keep her job. She also gets paid 20% more than me, even though I am the lead of this team.

Am I stuck working with Taylor forever? I understand that we need to document her performance issues, but as I am not in HR and I am technically not her supervisor (Cori is), what can I do? Will I have to do twice the work for less pay while Taylor continues to mess up left and right? My mental health can’t handle it! I have a new baby and a toddler at home. I am considering leaving this job, which is my dream job, because I cannot see an end to this nightmare. I worry that Taylor’s attorney parent will come after the company for anything that goes wrong with her. Due to the budget cuts, our HR department is in disarray with no clear leader.

The. best thing your company can do is to seek competent legal advice, because they clearly haven’t done that yet — if in fact you’re right that they’re not willing to fire Taylor because of her disability.

That said, are you sure that’s the case? It sounds like so far you’re just speculating. I can see why — it seems like Taylor is untouchable when she shouldn’t be, and it’s natural to go looking for the reason. And maybe your company really is afraid she’ll sue if they fire her … but there are loads of companies that don’t fire people who are terrible at their jobs simply because they’re wimps and they suck at managing, even when there’s no potential legal concern in play.

To be clear on the law: while the Americans with Disabilities Act does require employers to try to find reasonable accommodations that will allow disabled employees to do their jobs, it does not require them to keep people on who aren’t doing the work at an acceptable level. Accommodations are to help people do the job, not to protect their job if they’re not. It doesn’t matter that Taylor has a parent who’s a lawyer; the law is very clear that if an employee isn’t performing the job acceptably, with or without accommodations, their employer is not prohibited from firing them.

If your company really is afraid to fire Taylor because of the ADA, they need to talk to a lawyer who can set them straight on the law and guide them on how to proceed.

But again, that may not even be their concern.

The best thing you can do is to have a very candid conversation with Cori where you make it clear that you’re not willing to continue doing extra work to carry Taylor’s slack … and then stick to that. Ideally you’d then stop stepping in to do or redo her work. However, as the team lead, that gets tricky — because as the lead, you’re to some degree responsible for her work. Not as much as Cori is, but this is something you and Cori need to talk through because Cori’s long-term solution can’t be to rely on you to do extra work so she doesn’t need to deal with Taylor. So you and Cori need to have a serious conversation about what you are and aren’t willing to do about Taylor, and what that will mean going forward.

You can’t make your company fire Taylor, but you can put boundaries around how much you’re willing to absorb the burden of her incompetence yourself, and you can be insistent about dumping it back on Cori — Taylor’s boss — every time.

Whether that will suck all the joy out of doing your job is a different question. It very well may. And if Cori and your company remain unwilling to act, then it may be that yes, leaving your job is the only way to get away from the Taylor problem. But it’s worth recognizing that at that point the problem would be much more with your company’s incompetence than with Taylor’s.

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