How to Manage an Employee Who Always Makes Excuses

If an employee repeatedly fails, one of the reasons is often that they don’t know what showing up would look like. It’s common for managers to shortchange upfront alignment conversations in the name of speed. But that haste can cost you, especially with an unreliable employee. An investment in alignment upfront enables good performance and also provides the framework to address poor performance if it persists. Your job as a manager is to create a process that acts as a performance scaffold to strengthen an employee’s alignment, capability, and motivation. This process should support the person from the moment you assign the task until the moment they deliver it. It should also negate their standard excuses. But of course, exactly which planks you need in that scaffold depends on the person’s specific shortcomings. Work through a process that sets them up for success and removes the potential. Then if the employee fails to deliver and falls back on the “but, but, but…,” you’ve got all the fodder you need for a performance management conversation.