There’s someone on your team you’ve been working around instead of working with. You know exactly who.
Every store has one. The employee who’s not bad enough to fire but not good enough to trust. So you schedule around them. You put your strong people on their shifts to compensate. You redo their work quietly after close.
And you tell yourself you’re being patient. Kind, even. But here’s what avoidance actually costs: your best people are watching you tolerate mediocrity, doing the extra work it creates, and updating their opinion of you every week the talk doesn’t happen. With your biggest quarter weeks away, you can’t carry a passenger through Q4. It’s time.
Admit What the Avoidance Is Costing
The conversation feels expensive. Awkward, emotional, maybe a shift that ends in tears or a two-week notice. So you keep paying the quieter price instead.
Count it up. The sales their weak floor game leaves behind. The hours your strong people spend covering. The message every avoided conversation sends to the rest of the team: performance here is optional. The awkward talk costs you thirty minutes. The avoidance bills you every single day.
If you’ve mentally scheduled around someone for more than a month, you’re not managing them. You’re managing around them.
Drop the Story, Keep the Facts
Half the dread comes from how you’ve framed the talk in your head: a confrontation about who they are. “She’s lazy.” “He doesn’t care.” Walk in with that story and the conversation becomes an argument about character, which nobody wins.
Strip it back to observable facts. Not “you have a bad attitude,” but “you’ve been late four times this month” or “you’re averaging half the add-ons of the rest of the team.” Facts can be discussed, measured and fixed. Character verdicts can only be defended against. Fair feedback starts with what actually happened, not with your interpretation of it.
Before the talk, list the specific behaviours and numbers. If you can’t name three concrete examples, you’re not ready to have the conversation yet.
Make It a Conversation, Not a Verdict
Here’s what managers forget: you only know your half of the story. Maybe there’s something happening at home. Maybe they were never actually trained on the thing you assume they’re refusing to do. Maybe they think they’re doing fine because nobody’s ever told them otherwise.
So state the facts, explain the impact on the team and the store, and then ask. “What’s going on?” Then listen, actually listen, to the answer. Fair means they get a real chance to respond and a real chance to improve, with your help. Firm means the expectation itself doesn’t move. Both at once. That’s the whole art.
Agree on what changes, by when, and how you’ll both know. A talk without a specific commitment is just venting with an audience.
Follow Up Like You Mean It
The talk isn’t the finish line. It’s the starting gun. What happens in the two weeks after decides everything: catch them doing it right and say so, correct the slips fast and privately, and check in on the commitment you both made.
Two outcomes are possible, and both beat where you are now. They improve, and you’ve turned a passenger back into a player just in time for the rush. Or they don’t, and you now have a clear, fair, documented basis for the harder decision. What you no longer have is the worst option: another quarter of pretending not to see it.
Put the follow-up conversation in the calendar before the first one ends. Accountability without a date is a suggestion.
The Bottom Line
The talk you’ve been avoiding is rarely as bad as the version in your head, and it’s never as expensive as another month of silence. Facts instead of stories, a conversation instead of a verdict, firm on the standard, fair to the person, and follow-up that proves you meant it.
Have it this week. Your store is about to enter the three months that decide the year, and every person on the floor needs to be pulling. Including the one you’ve been working around.
A team that’s coached and accountable is half the battle. Knowing how to drive sales when fewer people are walking through your doors is the other half. And we’re covering it live next week.
Join our free webinar, Store Traffic is Down. Now What? Proven strategies to drive sales in any environment, happening next week on September 30th. One hour, no cost, and you’ll leave with tactics your team can run immediately.
© Graff Retail | The Talk You’ve Been Avoiding
