I encountered a situation the other day that has been on my mind all weekend. For a number of months now, one of our most high-performance employees has been on a downward slide -- in her performance, her morale, and unfortunately, in her behavior. The downward slide coincided with the addition of a new member to her department -- a member she demonstrates a clear and seemingly irrational distaste for. The results are reasonably predictable -- the new employee does not get well trained or mentored, assimilation of the new employee ground to a halt, and other members of the department felt forced to pick sides. What a disappointment.

We've been fairly straightforward in dealing with this problem. The star performer has been there for nearly a decade, and continues to grow in her capabilities. We don't want her to go anywhere. The new employee comes with great experience and references, though from a related field. It's very difficult to find quality employees with this background who can also get through our rigorous pre-employment assessment process. There's no reason to think she won't ultimately be great, and we don't want to lose her. So we (that would be myself and the leadership group involved in this area) have been direct, have held individual and group discussions, and have made it clear that in the absence of information to suggest the new employee can't be successful, we expect her training and assimilation to continue, and that we'll provide support as appropriate. We worked with the department to break down the walls that had formed as people chose sides. For the most part the new employee began to assimilate and the group returned to more productive working behaviors.

Except for our star. She continues to spiral, and went so far as to confide to a co-worker that the new employee had "stolen her mojo." This deeply threatened behavior continues to show up, and as recently as last week, when asked if she was providing training as appropriate, our star said, "Well, if she asks me a question I try to find time to answer it." I was completely at a loss. It was honest all right. But you'd have to be completely delusional to admit you were behaving so pettily in front of a group of peers!

I decided after that comment that I better take an active role in the training of the members of that team. I don't want to take the risk that they will continue to divide and slide, and I have the direct knowledge necessary to assist with the assimilation of this person and any new people they bring into their area. Clearly we can't keep depending heavily on our star's abilities, because she's demonstrated that she's stuck at the interpersonal conflict level.

So on Friday I brought some training information to their group meeting. And as I shared the knowledge I brought, I could see that it was not only meaningful to the other members of the team, but that our star was actively engaged, writing down notes and asking questions. And I had an insight about our star.

I think she may be totally intuitive. I think it's possible that she is so naturally good at what she does -- is so clearly playing to her personal strengths -- that she doesn't really know "why" she does certain things, or perhaps doesn't reflect on what she's doing at all. And if that's the case, when a series of new employees (because the woman referred to above is the third near-failure in adding teammates to this area) have been handed to our star with an instruction to train them and mentor them, maybe she had no clue how to impart what she knows to someone else in a way that permits them to become independently successful. And if that's the case, then even as her frustration with her new team members grew, it's very likely that she began to suffer from feelings of inadequacy and shaken confidence as a trainer as well.

Some people simply don't know how to train others, because they aren't process thinkers. We can train others to think as we think to a small extent, but we can train others to do as we do to a great extent. If we train desired outcomes and specific activities and behaviors, our trainees are far more likely to be successful. If we train someone to "be" like us or to think like us, they are likely to fail and we are likely to be frustrated. A process thinker can break down what they do into small increments and then train those increments. A process thinker will turn seemingly complex jobs into a series of discreet tasks. Our star isn't a process thinker, and there are probably a lot of other stars like her.

I'm going to invest in a careful strategy of breaking down the work in that area and working with all the members of the team to ensure they know the processes that will lead to success. I'm hoping that by using my process approach the other team members will quickly catch up to the point we were hoping they would be at before now. I'm also hoping that by taking some of the training burden off our star, she'll have the capacity and the inclination to do the internal work of accepting that a lot of the problems on her team and between herself and the other woman have to do with her difficulties training and her handling of her feelings when she couldn't get the results she wanted.

It's possible that my observation on Friday was incorrect, so I'll pay attention to this thing as it unfolds. But if this insight is correct, then I'll have learned a very important lesson for the future. From now on, I'll consider whether or not someone is a process thinker before entrusting the training and mentoring of new team members to them. And when training and mentoring are taking place for new associates in the future, I'll also keep a keen eye on how the new associates are progressing, and whether their trainer is focused on teaching the new person how to think (like them), or whether the trainer is focused on teaching the new person the desired end results and actions required to achieve them.

And hopefully, everyone will live happily (together) ever after.