20. "Won't do issue" vs "Can't do issue"

 Long ago, I overheard my boss conversation with another boss over a company meal. The discussion focus on how to get their employees to perform. So, he said it all boil down to 2 issues which is “Won’t do issue” and “Can’t do issue”.

In “Can’t do issue”, the employee does not have the skill to perform the required job thus you should give him more training and opportunity to learn. You must get to the bottom of this and properly assess whether the employee have the required skill to perform that job.

In the case of “Won’t do issue”, the employee does not want to do it. It may due to “attitude problem” or “remuneration problem”.  Their conversation stopped there. The rest of the details below is my own interpretation.

First, one should properly assess their employee potential. What they are capable of and what they are not? Then only address the won’t do issue. For attitude problem, it is may be due to fairness or ego issue. This has to be addressed at company level. For remuneration problem, perhaps the incentive structure is wrong. For example, a big Telco operator would like their staff to be certified in Cisco CCNA certification but most of their staff is reluctant to do so. Well, the manager can say it is part of their KPI but then not concrete came out from that. I told them just make a new scheme, “Certification Allowance of RM100 per month”, then every staff will get their certification done without much issue.

So what is the worst case scenario? Over the years, I came to a conclusion for a nasty situation. Let assume it is Mr X. Mr X is not capable of doing the task begin assigned to him. Yet not only he grabs the task and prevented others from performing it, he also boasted that he knows all the stuff. Then he will assign the task to his lower sub-ordinate. He will not be able to properly supervise them. Then, in case the job get partial done, he won’t remunerate his lower sub-ordinate and take all the credit. This is a typical mid-level manager in Malaysia. So, it is “Can’t do and won’t do + lie (won’t tell U the truth) Issue”.