Matt,

Thanks for the comment! You’re asking a good, very difficult question that I imagine a lot of other people are also struggling with.

So, let’s assume that you do NOT have the option to get rid of somebody that you would really like to get rid of, so you’re trying to make the most of a bad situation. What you should do depends on which of these three statements (“I like you,” “The work we do is important,” and/or “I believe you are capable of handling that work.”) you aren’t able to say.

For starters, you should be able to say “the work we do is important” to everyone – if not, then you’re stuck in a job you consider to be meaningless and it will be virtually impossible for you to motivate anyone. If that happens to be your issue, then you probably need to spend some time thinking about the value that your job brings to the world. Focus less on money/prestige and more on meaning/impact, and you’ll help not only yourself but everyone you work with as well.

If you don’t think this person is up to the challenges required by the job, then your job is to retrain them or provide them with the ability to train themselves. This will almost certainly require a very difficult conversation where you’ll have to say, “Your current skill set isn’t up to par for what we need right now,” and that will not be easy to do. If you focus the conversation around the skills necessary for the work, RATHER than around the deficiencies of the person in question, it will go better, but it will still be tough. However, if you follow that by providing opportunities to improve and show that you are genuinely interested in helping someone get better, the good employees will rise to the challenge. The bad ones won’t and will probably still be resentful and non-productive, but you’ll have done everything you can AND you’ll have put yourself into a much stronger position to argue for this person’s firing or replacement if you can figure out how to have that conversation with whoever is in charge.

If you don’t like the person (I’m guessing this is the main issue), then you’ll just have to find ways to like them – not all of them, obviously, but certain things about them. For example, my guess is that this person is negative and says no to a lot of things. So the next time that you’re faced with making a decision, go to this person and say something like, “I’m thinking about making a decision about X. I know what I think is exciting about it, but I’d love to explain it to you and have you play devil’s advocate and tell me everything you think is wrong with it.” Then you’re leveraging this person’s natural tendency to find problems (which will actually be valuable in this instance instead of annoying), and you’ll hopefully be making them feel more valuable and useful. Also, allowing them to vent their frustrations first before you unilaterally make a decision is simultaneously more likely to get them to listen to your ideas and also less likely to complain if you end up overriding their concerns and doing it anyway, since at least they’ll know that they’ve been heard.

None of these approaches are perfect, and the examples I’ve used might not be perfectly applicable to you. But hopefully this has been helpful. Would love to know what you think or if you’d like to refine your question so that I can try for a different answer.

Thanks!

Jeff