my employee is upset she wasn’t promoted — and senior management is noticing her attitude

A reader writes:

I am a manager of a small team at a midsize company.

Recently, one of my best performers (Jan) had a dip in morale. During Q4, we had an opening come up that would be a small promotion for her, but we were told we couldn’t fill it until the new fiscal year. She was told by me and other managers to continue performing at a high level and was given additional responsibilities to prove herself. We all felt she was a shoo-in and even told her this during her annual review.

Unfortunately, the new fiscal year came around and we could not promote her. Senior management wanted to bring in an external hire. The senior manager wants to move Jan to a new team where she would be on the same level with the same pay.

When I told Jan, she was upset. She said she felt confused because she was told by me and the other managers (including multiple senior managers) that she was a good fit for the promotion. She didn’t see the new team as an opportunity to grow and has even dropped the ball on a few projects she was working on for her current role. She is responsible for training the new hire on the projects she’s taken on and she hasn’t even made any training materials for it. Her level of engagement has gone down to zero and senior management has noticed the decline.

How do I convince Jan to change her attitude? She is hurting her image with senior management at this point. I can’t promote her even if I wanted to, my hands are tied by what senior management will allow. When I try to talk to her, she seems very disinterested in the conversations. Please help me get a previously highly engaged employee back to this level.

You probably can’t! She took on extra work to prove herself for a promotion she was told she was a shoo-in for, which was then yanked away. Not only is she not getting the promotion multiple people told her to expect, but now she’s being asked to train the person who did? Of course she’s demoralized and doing less.

It would be a mistake to frame this to her as, “You’re hurting your image with senior management.” Given what’s happened, that’s highly likely to make her more bitter and cynical, and rightly so! No one seems concerned that they hurt their image with her.

It’s also likely that Jan is job-hunting, or at least thinking about it.

You should talk with the senior managers who are “noticing” Jan’s lack of engagement and explain why! Say you’re working to rebuild her trust in the organization, which has understandably been damaged.

Meanwhile, if Jan isn’t currently meeting the requirements of her job, you do need to talk to her about that — but that means truly not meeting them, not just that she isn’t going above and beyond like she used to. If she’s working at the same level as someone average on your team and it’s just different from the top performance she used to turn in … that’s a pretty natural consequence in a situation like this. People won’t continue performing at a higher-than-average level when they haven’t been treated well.

But if she’s actually performing at a lower-than-acceptable level (and she might be — you mentioned that she’s dropped the ball on a few projects), you do need to talk about that. You just need to be sensitive to the history when you do it. So the conversation isn’t, “You’ve been dropping the ball and that can ’t continue.” It’s something more like, “I fully understand why you’re upset. We shouldn’t have told you that you were a shoo-in for the promotion and had you take on additional duties without ensuring that upper management was on the same page. What happened isn’t fair to you, and I’m partly responsible for that. I understand why you might feel less invested in your job after that. But it’s starting to show up in your work in ways that it can’t— you’ve missed recent deadlines and (fill in with details). What can we do to get things back on track?”

Note that this isn’t about changing her attitude; it’s about getting her work back up to an acceptable level.

Alternately, you could frame it as, “I know it’s not realistic to expect you not to be upset by what happened. I would be too. But I also need you to meet the minimum requirements of your job. If you no longer want to be here, I would understand — although I hope you won’t decide that. But I do need you to decide if you’re up for continuing to do this job or not.”

If talking with Jan and laying out the specific things that need to change — again, focusing on lower-than-acceptable work, not the absence of above-and-beyond work — then at that point you need to have a more serious conversation about whether she still wants to stay in the position or not, and what you need from her if she does.

You should also think about whether there’s another path to promotion for her. Obviously, be very, very sure before presenting anything like that this time, and don’t ask her to take on extra responsibilities ahead of time.

Throughout this all, though, the key is to acknowledge what happened, acknowledge that you and others in the organization messed up and it was at her expense, and keep any conversation focused on whether she’s meeting the requirements of her job, not on whether she’s not as deeply invested as she used to be.

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