Troubled employees need guidance on what is acceptable or unacceptable behavior. The correct way to handle a situation in which an employee has gotten off track is to address the problem promptly and directly. This might be all it takes to turn a difficult situation around.

Taking another approach, such as covering or making excuses for the person, may seem generous and helpful on your part, but in reality, you may just be enabling the employee to continue making errors. A mentor helps an employee become better at both his abilities and his job. An enabler intends to do that but instead encourages dependent behavior by making excuses and redoing work. This is not a favor to the employee or to the organization. Consider the following scenario.

Randall was a brilliant but inexperienced writer, fresh from the journalism program of a prestigious university. His press releases captivated readers, and the news media often ran his stories just as he had written them. He had very tight deadlines, and he met them.

Unfortunately, Randall just couldn't seem to get the facts straight. He transposed numbers, misquoted executives, and made things up when he couldn't contact the people who could give him the details he needed. Marjorie, Randall's manager, spent a lot of her time undoing the damage Randall did. Her superiors suggested that she reassign Randall to other tasks in the public relations office until he was more seasoned, but she resisted.

After all, everyone makes mistakes — that's how she learned, and that's how most people learn. So Marjorie had the department's administrative assistant intercept all of Randall's press releases before they were sent out, and she corrected them. It was a process doomed to fail, and it did. Marjorie had emergency surgery and was out of the office for two months. Randall wrote a press release erroneously suggesting the company would post a loss in its third-quarter Firing report and stock prices plummeted. Marjorie's boss fired Randall and came very close to firing Marjorie as well.

Randall reminded Marjorie of herself when she was an enthusiastic neophyte in the corporate world. That world eventually stomped the enthusiasm out of her, though, with all of its rules and procedures, and she always wondered what would have happened if she'd been more resistant. She viewed her intercessions with Randall as protecting him from also being stomped into compliance, as safeguarding his ability to express his creativity and earn recognition for his talents.

She saw herself as Randall's mentor, the guide who would lead him through the entanglements of the corporate jungle. Marjorie failed to see that Randall made different, and more serious, mistakes than she had made when she was a novice publicist. And she failed to see that Randall was not a good fit for the company, and perhaps not for PR writing at all. He had talent, certainly, but he wasn't applying it in ways that would help his abilities broaden and grow.

However noble Marjorie's intentions, in truth she wasn't so much “saving” Randall as she was salvaging her own ego. Ultimately, her actions were about herself, not about him. And in the end, she was the one who still had a job, although the situation reflected poorly on her as a manager.

Employees are adults, and they need you to treat them as such. They need you to offer guidance on how to do things correctly, efficiently, and in keeping with company policies. They don't really benefit when you do things for them. This teaches them that there are no consequences associated with responsibility.