Reply to I think my new coworker is functionally illiterate? Help!

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Don't end up like me, OP. I've been working on a team with someone like this for 6 years. This person cannot even complete simple tasks on her own. My team leader prefers to avoid confrontation so makes us cover for her. It adds so much work to our own plates, but team leader believes it will reflect poorly on our team if we don't cover for this person.

What makes it worse is that team leader will be retiring in a few years and I will be expected to fill her shoes. That puts me in a bad position because I won't stand for enabling co-worker but it will become clear that I've helped cover it up for years but I haven't been in a position to "out" her. It will appear like we didn't do a good job of training her, even though she actually has more years in the field than I do so it will reflect worse on me than it does on her.

You need to start documenting and stop covering it up. [/quote]

Why don't you take your own advice and stop covering up for her. Today.[/quote]

Well, I refuse to do the extra work that useless co-worker can't/won't do, but team leader will do it in order to avoid discomfort. Or it becomes a situation like: everyone is expected to arrive to our team meeting with their individual work done so we can compile it. Co-worker shows up either with nothing at all (claiming she didn't understand or she tried but something didn't work). I tell co-worker that she needed to have dealt with that before our meeting when it was due. [b]Team leader senses discord and says we'll just do it it right then and it "will only take 5 minutes". [/b]Of course it ends up taking longer than that and we end up needing to meet much longer than scheduled or schedule a separate meeting to accomplish what the original meeting was supposed to have accomplished.

I have asked team leader to speak up to big boss about the issue but she refuses.  I have thought about going behind team leader's  back to our boss, but at this point it would reflect poorly on me. And the culture of the workplace is that we would end up being responsible for "building capacity" in useless co-worker so either way it won't matter. Co-worker says she tries but "it doesn't work". This could mean anything from scanning and emailing a document or finding and printing a report. Never mind actually analyzing the data. And this is just the administrative part of our job. It's not the "meat" of our work. She's useless with that too.  Co-worker's claim is always that it just doesn't work for her, although it works fine for everyone else.  She is a protected class and also has a language barrier which big boss does not want to touch with a 10 foot pole. Since it doesn't impact big boss at all because the work ends up getting done,  big boss just pretends not to notice. [/quote]

Then call out team leader in the middle of the meeting.  Be direct and calm.  People like him are going to give you no trouble because as you said he doesn't like discord so he isn't going to speak up or do anything and will likely be simply relieved that someone else did the part of the job he didn't want to.
"No, team leader, we are not going to do it right now. It's not appropriate to do this now and wastes valuable time." Turn to coworker and tell her to go back to her office and complete the work and you are expecting it by the time the meeting has ended. 
[/quote]

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