If an employee isn't performing well, the manager needs to understand why before taking action Dear Bob …When there is a problem it is often said that “we are looking for the solution/problem but not looking to place blame.” While in some ways I see this as productive, isn’t it unproductive if the same person is central to the problems the group/organization is experiencing, over and over again?[ Also on InfoWorld, Bob Lewis shares some wisdom on working with a different kind of colleague in “Managing an employee who is not ‘executive material’” | Get sage advice on IT careers and management from Bob Lewis in InfoWorld’s Advice Line newsletter. ] What is your thought on this?– Hardcase Dear Hardcase … Just to be clear, I’m going to use the ITIL terminology, where an incident is a single event; “problem” means the same sort of incident recurs and there’s a root cause to be addressed. With that in mind:It’s entirely possible that the root cause of an incident is an individual who didn’t do his job properly. It’s also entirely possible (and not uncommon) that the same individual habitually doesn’t do his/her job properly, and this is the root cause of the problem.When that’s the case, a manager has just as much responsibility to fix the problem as when the root cause is a RAID controller that’s generating intermittent errors. With the nonperforming employee, though, the manager needs to dig deeper to find out why the employee isn’t performing properly. This is the difference between designating the employee as the root cause and assigning blame: The employee might have never received the necessary training, might be going through a painful divorce or have a very sick child and is distracted, might be suffering from depression, might have tried to fix the problem and had the manager refuse to spend what was needed to fix it — you get the idea. And this might be someone who is in the wrong position and won’t succeed in it no matter what the manager does. If that’s the case, the manager needs to understand what went wrong in the hiring process that resulted in his/her selecting an employee who didn’t work out, to improve the hiring process for the next hire. After all, replacing one bad employee with another bad employee doesn’t accomplish anything useful.Assign blame and none of this happens. The manager simply fires the employee as punishment for the crime of poor performance and either hires another bad employee or hires a potentially good one, then sets the new employee up for failure as well.– Bob This story, “You won’t fix the problem by blaming the employee,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Careers