Submitted by btmnk21 on
in
Forums
Hi All,
Not sure this is the right forum for this issue but here it goes (and for legal reasons I will be somewhat vague)
I recently was promoted to a Senior position in a new department with a Junior employee reporting to me and have a dilemma I am facing. This is also my first direct report.
For context, this Junior person is 10 years old than me, and in my prior department was the person who had trained me for the first month, and then in the following two years supported my work as an associate level employee and we both reported to our common Manager.
A year ago, this employee left that department transferring to the new department and with that transfer was also promoted to the Junior level, even though they did not have the education to back it up. At that time the manager of the new department asked for my opinion on this person and how they would fair in the new role. I was honest and said they would be in over their head because I had found this person to be unreliable and “more talk than substance”.
When I also decided to transfer to the new department my new manager confided in me the shortcomings of this employee and how they regretted hiring them because many projects had been reassigned or put on hold because this person could not execute.
Before my official transfer, I took this employee on in a mentor role During this period the employee made an effort to let me know how well they were doing and how much our new manager liked them, which seemed strange. This employee also started dumping their work on me, for example stating in a group setting it was my project now (a month early) or coming to me asking me when I thought “X” would be done when X was assigned to them for a year.
Starting a month ago this person became my direct report. There have been several issues that have come up:
- Asking me to do their work, attend meetings on their behalf.
- Going around me to my Manager (their old manager) with questions on tasks I assigned them, asking if they were valid tasks for them to do.
- A constant need for me review each email and document they create.
- Inability to manage their time. This employee came to me in a panic stating an assignment that was due in two days and another due in a week would not be done. I asked why and they said a lot of work had hit a department we support and they were needed. I asked for a specific list of the tasks and an estimated time for each task. The total list added up to 2 hrs.
- I asked this employee to update a form we use, and to expand their understanding of the form’s purpose by reading up on industry websites and other companies’ forms. The final draft they submitted was suspicious to me because the language was not theirs and the form had tripled in size, when I was expecting a few more fields to be added. I searched Google using phrases from the form and it is just a copy and paste from 3 other forms mashed together.
What should I do? Is the plagiarism a serious offense? I have scheduled a 1 on 1 for next week for all of the above.