If she's so underpaid and I'm completely without integrity

[MusicMenu]

or any professionalism, why does she want to stay?

I work for a small part of a large public sector organisation in a senior leadership position.

A staff member (who applied for but didn't get my job, it's always been tricky) feels strongly that her job is unfairly banded.

I had nothing to do with the original banding, but agreed to review it. I have completed the evaluation process, including sending it to HR for an impartial overview and they have confirmed it's correct.

I've also said that if she is aware of similar roles elsewhere that are banded higher and can give me details, I'll ask HR to look at it again. (She can't because they don't exist)

All the similar roles advertised locally, recently are actually one band lower, some two bands lower, although it is hard to know exactly what the content is.

Now I am accused of having misled HR, despite reviewing and agreeing the job description that was sent to them with staff member - apparently I will have steered them to the result I wanted. So she's also accusing the HR director of having no integrity.

I actually don't really care, if the evaluation had come out higher I'd have changed it. I want it to be correct, not higher or lower than it should be.

I am this close to telling her that if the job is so underpaid and she doesn't trust me to run things with integrity she really would be better off elsewhere.

Hold me back?

[MusicMenu]

She could develop skills, there are lots of opportunities to do that, it's not going to change the banding of the job.

[Mmn654123]

@MusicMenu

She could develop skills, there are lots of opportunities to do that, it's not going to change the banding of the job.

Indeed but you can present it as helping her to prepare herself for more senior roles, as and when they arise!

That way, you get to talk about her moving on while sounding caring and not constructively dismissing.

And it’s up to her to think about what direction she wants to develop in and what skills she needs to get there. Zero effort on your part beyond listening to her once a month and helpfully critiquing her suggestions.

But I agree. Her job won’t change because don’t need it to. It’s about the role. The role is graded correctly. If she things she can do greater things but isn’t doing them, she needs to be ‘supported’ to develop so she can. If she ever wants to. But it’s a way of redirecting her moaning and the wider team will think you have the patience of a saint.

In my experience they tend to leave after about four months.

[Mmn654123]

Or they stop moaning. That’s less common!

[Killahangilion]

Hang on in there OP. It will change eventually and the likelihood is that she will move elsewhere or accept the situation and get on with it.

I had a similar scenario and actually felt sorry for her. Luckily for me, she took early retirement, although she did bitch about me to staff in my own and other depts. in the 3 months she was still there, so I had a bit of fire fighting to do in the first few months.

Unfortunately, she’d been promoted to temporary Acting manager for about 6 months so assumed the interview was just a formality. The senior management were shits because they obviously used her to keep things ticking over.

Sadly, there’s no way she’d have got the role permanently because it was pivotal to a massive overhaul of the whole system and required a very different skill set. I had a relevant degree and experience in a similar department elsewhere that had successfully completed the move.

No idea what your set up is like OP, but it took a long time for me to build a good team as some of the existing staff felt very loyal to her even after she’d left and were also largely in the dark about the changes and tried to dig their heels in at times, which helped no-one.

In hindsight, I’d have done some things very differently.