Can you describe a time when your efforts to mentor someone resulted in unintended consequences? How did you respond?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

Situation: I had a situation where I had hired a candidate in one of my teams
based on the interview feedback provided by the panel. It was a thorough
evaluation of technical and cultural fit assessment. Based on the feedback I
approved hiring this candidate. After few weeks of training, when it came to a
point where my leads were assigning tasks to this individual, he was not
performing to the extent we believed he would during the interview.

Task: My role was to find out the reason for this discrepancy in performance. I
came up with open mind to really understand the issues and set expectations as
the leader of the organization. Also, I volunteered to speak with him because I
did not directly interview him during his interviews which would give me an
opportunity to evaluate whats going on with the fresh state of mind without a
Bias

Action: I set up a meeting to understand his situation with the intention to him
out and also to seek feedback and make sure that the environment set up was open
and set up for success. He initially showed lot of interest and started giving
some excuses stating that he was not comfortable with the technology, teams and
mainly struggling to get acclimatized with PayPal ecosystem. So, I tried to
coach him by sharing the relevant context, documents and pointing him to the
right POC. After about 2 to 3 weeks, I still could not find improvement in his
performance and my leads were complaining of his availability, engagement and
enthusiasm. I then spoke with HR to subject him to the internal performance
improvement process. Since this process is rigorous, we found out that he was
moonlighting and was not available fully at work. I then worked with HR to go
through the process to terminate this person.

Result - I could see that the team was not overburdened with things that they
has to support and we were able to backfill a candidate in place of this person
who jelled very well with the team.

Can you describe a time when your efforts to mentor someone resulted in unintended consequences? How did you respond?

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