A reader writes:
I have an intern this semester who is book smart and a very hard worker. But there’s one big problem — he’s bad at things he thinks he’s a superstar with.
A few examples:
– He thinks he’s an amazing writer. The truth is, his writing is awful. He misspells words, leaves out words, has no organization, and generally writes in an unprofessional manner.
– He thinks he’s great at public speaking. In reality, his presentations are disorganized. He speaks very quickly and loudly and uses a lot of insider language that most other people don’t understand. He’s also completely clueless about when he’s lost his audience.
– He thinks he’s good at digital. In reality, the social media posts he’s written are cringe-worthy. His attempts to edit websites have often resulted in me spending hours fixing his work. His photos and videos are blurry, have bad lighting, and aren’t framed well.
I’ve tried talking to him about slowing down and being more thorough with his work. I’ve also gone through all the changes I’ve done to his work so he understands why they were necessary. I’ve put him on different types of projects that he claims to be brilliant at so I could find his strength and make sure that he is lightening my work load instead of doubling it (which is what is happening now). It’s not working.
Even worse, he’s applied for a full-time job with my company and is convinced he’s going to get it. In fact, he’s already told me to be prepared to lose him before the end of his internship because everything went amazingly and he knows my boss is going to want him to start immediately. He doesn’t know my boss thought his interview was awful and he failed his writing test.
I work in a creative industry. I think this kid has a lot of potential. But I fear he’s just not a good fit for our industry.
Any suggestions on how I continue to manage him for the rest of his internship? Is there a tactful way to let him know I think he’s great, but he’s just not good at this work?
So … when you say you think he’s great but he messes up everything he tackles and has no sense of his own abilities, I have to wonder if you really think he’s great or if you’re saying that because it feels like a kind thing say.
And hey, there’s nothing wrong with being kind. But I suspect it’s muddying your thinking here, because you have an intern who’s screwing up left and right and you haven’t told him that, and you need to.
So let’s talk about what being kind really means in this context.
Being kind in this situation would mean giving clear and specific feedback about where he isn’t currently strong and needs to work on improving. That’s true for anyone you manage, but it’s especially true for interns, who are supposed to be learning from the work they’re doing for you. He can’t learn if no one is willing to tell him where he’s falling short and what it would look like to do better.
Being kind in this context also would mean giving him some feedback on his interview so that he’s not thinking he’s about to be hired when that’s so far from the truth. (And yes, it’s on him that he’s making those kinds of assumptions, but he’s young and inexperienced and part of your role is to guide him.)
It is not kind to let him continue thinking he’s fantastic at things you’ve seen he’s terrible at. He’s going to pitch himself to future jobs based on a wildly inaccurate self-assessment, and if he bluffs his way into a job based on those things (which could definitely happen since with junior-level jobs, it’s common to hire people who don’t have much track record to look at yet), he’s going to end up getting fired. Maybe repeatedly! It’s not kind to let that happen just because you didn’t want to give him honest feedback.
It sounds like you’ve given him some feedback, but it’s been about specific changes you’ve made to his work or vaguer advice about slowing down and being more careful. It doesn’t sound like you’ve sat down with him and talked about the big picture. You need to move from “I changed X in your work because of Y” to feedback about the pattern you’re seeing and what it means for him overall.
Ideally, once you originally saw that his skills in an area weren’t what he’d claimed, you would have just been very straightforward about explaining the gap between his skills and what the work requires. For example: “The presentation skills I’ve seen from you so far are not at the level we need in order to give you projects like X and Y. To present professionally, we would need you to ____ (fill in details of what competence looks like in your context).” And ideally you’d show him some examples of what doing that well looks like, to help illustrate the difference and give him an exemplar to work from.
But at this point, where there are so many areas where this has happened — presenting, writing, social media, web work — the problem is so large that you really need to be thinking about whether it makes sense to keep him on. You’re not doing him any favors by allowing him to think (a) that his skills are sufficient when they’re not, or (b) that he can continually fail at project after project and stay in a job. Because really, if he were an employee rather than an intern, you would have needed to fire him by now. If you don’t want to fire him because he’s an intern, then you need to be up-front with him that his skills aren’t sufficient to do the kind of work you’ve been offering him, and that you’re going to need to change his assignments to lower-level work. (If he can’t do lower-level work either, then you really would need to let him go.)
But truly, the absolute kindest thing you can do here is to be very clear and explicit about where his skills don’t measure up to the work you’ve been giving him. Don’t let him go off into the work world with such a significant misunderstanding of what he’s currently capable of and how people perceive his work. It will cause him real professional damage that you are currently positioned to prevent.
When you’re a manager, even of interns — especially of interns! — you have an obligation to deliver honest feedback. A lot of managers in your shoes prioritize their own comfort (because it’s uncomfortable to tell someone their work isn’t good enough!) over what’s best for the employee. Don’t be that manager.
my intern thinks he’s good at things that he’s terrible at was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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