And then, there's a bearded fetus.

Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2026/03/my-bad-employee-showed-a-ton-of-initiative-in-a-personal-situation-can-i-use-that-to-explain-what-i-need-from-him-at-work.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=36616

A reader writes:

I have a new employee, Joe, who has been with me about six months. The headline is that he’s pretty terrible. He lacks knowledge, his work is slow and often wrong, he lacks attention to detail, shows no sense of urgency, ownership or understanding of priority, and requires constant hand-holding to even get close to completing tasks. There’s a lot to unpack about him but the short story is: I made a big hiring mistake and I know separately that I need to address it. This letter isn’t quite about that though.

Recently, a distant relative of Joe’s wife’s passed away. That’s sad. He was sending me constant (and unnecessary) updates about it. We have a super generous and broad vacation day policy — everyone gets 30 days a year, it’s easy to take. I told him he didn’t need to worry about keeping me updated during this difficult time; he should feel free to take the time he needed. I would ensure things were covered and we’d circle up when he was back. I want to emphasize here that I believe people should have leave when they experience a death.

That said, he decided to work one day this week. Instead of working, however, he dug through a surprisingly arcane part of our leave policy, one I didn’t know existed, to find an obscure bereavement leave process I was also unaware of. He asked if he could take bereavement leave instead of regular leave. I had no idea about this, so I dig up the HR policy. It was very clear: bereavement leave is only for immediate family (parent, child, spouse) and is only three days. So, I told him that based on my reading of the policy I didn’t think I would be allowed to approve bereavement leave, but I would be happy to approve as much regular leave as he needed. He doesn’t take much time at all, so he had 27 days banked, just for context.

So, again, instead of doing his job, he contacted HR asking if bereavement leave would be allowed for distant relatives especially if he was “close” to the relative. HR wrote back and said “oh yes, of course!” which frustrates me on a separate front. It seems illogical that HR has a clear policy that they apparently don’t require people to follow. As a manager, this makes me look bad when I’m just trying to follow the rules — but whatever! HR stinks. So anyway, he sent this email to me and then promptly requested five days of bereavement leave. Since HR obviously didn’t care about the policy regarding the type of relative, I figured why the heck would they care about the three-day limit — so I approved it. He’s off this week; I hope he’s getting through it.

Except! I’m quite livid about this and seeking your advice to get through it. Joe put more immediate and consistent effort into figuring out how to avoid taking a vacation day than he has on literally anything he’s worked on in six months. I’ve never seen him own, care about, and follow through on something like this. He’s making almost six figures and regularly performing far below his expected level. I’ve started providing constructive feedback, but he always spirals, claiming he’s trying hard and doing his best. He responds to nothing I say about how taking notes during meetings might help him remember things, or that making a to-do list might help, or that he should feel free to ask questions if he’s unsure about something. I’m not mean, I don’t yell, and I don’t convey any of this in a threatening manner. I do my best to be gentle, kind, and encouraging. Nothing seems to work — he’s just consistently an under-performer, except it seems, when it comes to something he cares about, which is apparently not his job or the quality of his work. It’s about ensuring he can maximize time off for the death of a distant relative to whom he has no direct relation. In that case, he was eager to go find information, push for resolution, ask questions, and care about the details.

As he’s been out, I’m just getting mad about this. Now I see that he’s capable of the behaviors required for his job — so he isn’t struggling and in need of mentorship or guidance. He’s capable of doing a good job, but he doesn’t. That’s probably an oversimplification. I do think he lacks many core skills for his job (again, this is my fault regarding hiring, I really messed up).

At the end of this long note, my question for you is: Is there some way I can contextualize and offer feedback to Joe about this situation? That, as his boss, I would like him to try doing his job as well as he did when he was trying not to do his job?

This is hard because I don’t want to misstep and come off as insensitive about death, sadness and emotional stuff. If had told me he wanted to take two weeks off, I would have approved it. We work in a state with generous paid leave; if he wanted a month, I would have helped him navigate that. My core issue here is that he dug deep on something so obscure to achieve an outcome. This is exactly the behavior I wish he’d exhibit at work (owning tasks and driving them to completion), yet I’ve seen him do it zero times until now.

Ultimately, I probably just need to start hard documenting his various failures and get him PIP’d out. But I just genuinely thought he was inexperienced and capable of improvement, so I believed mentorship, guidance, and support would be a path to success that I, as his boss, could provide. I no longer think that.

Beat me up here if I’m being unreasonable – I’ll take the feedback, I promise!

In that case I’m going to say it bluntly: This is more on you than it is on Joe!

It’s on Joe, too. But as his manager, it’s mostly on you.

You have an employee who you describe as “pretty terrible,” who does indeed sound pretty terrible, who doesn’t respond to feedback and hasn’t shown any improvement despite coaching. That’s the problem that has been requiring far more urgency from you, and that would be the case even if the bereavement leave situation never happened.

It sounds like the bereavement situation jolted you into seeing it more clearly, but it’s been the case all along: you need to manage Joe much more actively and be more assertive about resolving the situation one way or the other (meaning that he needs to either raise his performance to a good level in the very near future or you need to replace him with someone else).

But you should not use the death of his relative as a way to say, “This kind of persistence and initiative is what I need from you in your job.” Nor do you need to! You should just start managing him much more closely — which at this point means moving from just coaching to more serious warnings, as well as a clearly structured path that will end with him either making specific improvements by a specific timeline or leaving the job. You needed to be on this path before the bereavement situation; you can get on it now without referencing the bereavement.

On the bereavement leave specifically, I do think you made some weird choices — approving him for five days of leave when the policy only offers three doesn’t make a lot of sense. You’re saying “well, HR clearly doesn’t care about who you can take bereavement for, so they probably don’t care how many days it is either,” but that’s a pretty big leap. When Joe asked for five days, why not contact HR at that point and say, “Joe is asking for five days and my understanding is that it’s only three — can you confirm before I respond?”

On the issue of who he can take the leave for: if this is really a distant relative of his wife who he wasn’t close to himself, then yes, he’s abusing the policy … but do we actually know that? He knew enough to give you play-by-plays of what was happening, so it seems possible that he was closer to this person than you realized. Or maybe not, of course — some people do abuse this kind of situation and stretch the truth when it will benefit them, and maybe that happened here. But it’s not outrageous for your HR to choose to trust him when he said they were close. And yes, HR needs to clarify the policy because otherwise you’ll have people thinking they can’t take the leave for the death of the aunt who raised them, when that’s apparently not their intent, but you leaped really fast to “throw the whole thing out.”

Anyway, the upshot is that you need to manage Joe more assertively. You’re feeling frustrated because you’re not getting what you need from him, but that just means you need to step things up on your side. You have all the power here.

The post my bad employee showed a ton of initiative in a personal situation — can I use that to explain what I need from him at work? appeared first on Ask a Manager.

https://www.askamanager.org/2026/03/my-bad-employee-showed-a-ton-of-initiative-in-a-personal-situation-can-i-use-that-to-explain-what-i-need-from-him-at-work.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=36616