A person has worked for the firm for twenty-three years. They were good, they are no longer, and the gap has been widening for about four.
Work is routed around them. Colleagues cover quietly. The owner is aware, has been aware for years, and has not acted, because every available option feels like a betrayal of somebody who gave the firm most of their working life.
What the delay actually costs
The costs are real and they fall on people who did not choose them.
Colleagues absorb the work. Usually the most capable ones, because they are the people who can. They notice, they are not asked, and they are not compensated for it.
The standard becomes visibly conditional. Everybody can see that performance is not what determines outcomes here. The younger employee held to a standard this person is not held to draws the obvious conclusion.
The person loses years. Somebody in a role they cannot do knows it. They are not comfortable; they are managing an increasingly exposed position with no way to raise it. Years in which they could have moved to something they could do well are spent instead in a slow decline everybody is politely ignoring.
That last cost is the one owners consistently miss, because the delay is experienced as kindness toward the person and is frequently the thing doing them the most damage.
Establish what changed
Before deciding anything, find out which situation this is, because four different things present identically.
The job changed and they did not. New systems, new requirements, new scale. Common, addressable, and frequently a training question that nobody raised because raising it seemed to imply something.
They are in the wrong role. Promoted into supervision years ago on the strength of technical work, and struggling at something they were never suited to.
Something outside work. Health, a family situation, or something at home. This is more common than employers assume and it is temporary in a substantial share of cases.
Genuine decline. Capability that is not coming back.
The only way to find out is to ask, directly and privately, which is the conversation that has been deferred for four years and is the one that resolves it.
Where health may be involved
A distinction that matters practically and legally.
Where a change in performance may relate to a health condition, an employer’s obligations are specific, they are not intuitive, and they attach whether or not the employer has recognised the situation.
This is the point to involve counsel, before a conversation rather than after one. An employer who handles this without advice is exposed, and more importantly may miss an accommodation that would have resolved the situation entirely.
The same applies to age. A decision that would be defensible on performance grounds becomes something else if the reasoning has drifted, and the drift is easy and unintentional.
The options between nothing and termination
Owners frequently frame this as a binary and defer indefinitely because both options are unacceptable. Several arrangements sit between them.
A different role that matches what the person can still do, at appropriate pay, described honestly rather than dressed up. Reduced hours. A defined period to address something specific, with support and a stated review. A planned retirement on a known date, negotiated openly, which gives the person time and the firm a transition.
The last of those is the most under-used and frequently the best available. It converts an indefinite decline into a bounded arrangement with a date, and it lets somebody leave on their own terms after twenty-three years rather than being managed out.
Honesty is what respect actually consists of
The instinct is to soften the account until the person can accept it comfortably. That instinct produces the worst version.
Somebody told that a restructuring happens to have eliminated their position, when everybody including them knows what actually occurred, has been handled rather than dealt with. They will work out the real reason and they will conclude that after twenty-three years nobody would say it to their face.
The honest version is harder to deliver and lands better. The work has changed and you are struggling with it, I have not raised it for too long, and that is my failure rather than yours. Here is what I think we should do.
Owning the delay is not a courtesy. It is accurate, and it makes the rest of the conversation possible.
In a small place
Everything above is harder where the person cannot readily find comparable work, where their family depends on the position, and where you will see each other continuously afterward.
The distinction from the employer obligations entry holds. The decision should be made on the same basis it would be anywhere. The execution can carry a great deal — more notice, more assistance, more time, calls to other employers — and that is where twenty-three years is honoured.
What is not available is a third option in which nothing is decided and nobody is uncomfortable. That option has been in effect for four years, it is being paid for by other people, and it is doing the most damage to the person it was intended to protect.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD