Embarrassingly long post ahead.
I need help figuring out how to manage an employee who seems to be lying about almost everything she says about herself.
My small business sells a product-based service. To preserve anonymity, I'll say that we offer high-end hair extensions and extension installation. We've been open for about 3 years. I was doing all of the extensions myself, with occasional assistance from contractors, until I hired an experienced service provider named Carrie about 6 months ago.
Our team consists of:
- Me - owner
- Lila - manages our website, scheduling calendar, and social media; has been with the salon since day 1
- Carrie - our new service provider
- Delaney - our business/operations manager, who was hired at the same time as Carrie
Working with Carrie is making me hate my business and want to burn it to the ground. We were supposed to have a 6-month review at which I would tell her whether she would be promoted to store manager, and that date is coming up quickly, but I don't see her being able to take on that role for a long time, if ever. I feel uncertain about how to handle her review because my primary feedback is that I think she is lying constantly, and I feel like I can't trust her. But that feedback feels too vague. I also can't decide if maybe I'm just going crazy....?
I think I need a mindset shift, and I definitely need an outside perspective. She is such a sweet person, and I have horrible guilt about my feelings about her.
Why did I hire Carrie?
- She had been with her previous employer for 5 years, which is a long time in our industry. She had glowing reviews from her previous manager, and she had a reasonable health-related explanation for why she left that job.
- This is important: she has experience providing a related service that I really wanted to start offering to our clients, and it's an unusual skill. Let's say it's lash extensions.
What are the issues with Carrie?
She talks nonstop, all day every day, about herself and her health issues, even in front of clients.
She claims to be an expert in many tasks that relate to the business (and many others that don't), but she embellishes the truth so much about everything that I can no longer trust that she knows how to do the things she says she does.
Examples:
- She is 29. She often talks about her careers before this job, which is a normal topic of conversation, but she would be a thousand years old if she had actually had all of the careers she says she's had. As an example, she reports that she: (a) worked as a professional ballerina for 12 years, (b) was a working cellist for 15 years, (c) was one of the makeup artists for an extremely well known television show that is produced in our area for years, etc. There is a new career added to the list every week. But I have her resume, of course, and it says that she has worked in salons and retail jobs since she finished her associate's degree 7 years ago. That's it.
Her past careers are frequent topics of discussion with our clients, who have no reason to doubt them. And it seems harmless because nobody actually cares if she was a ballerina or not; they just care if she knows how to do their hair.
But these past careers do come up often when I am distributing tasks internally because she insists that she is an expert in any and every task related to the salon. As an example, if I say that we are going to have a photo shoot to showcase our new line of extensions and I'm hiring a makeup artist to do our models' makeup, she'll insist that she can do it because she has so much "professional experience" from doing makeup on a TV show. I usually deflect these offers by saying things like "I'll need you to be working on the extensions at the shoot, so I am bringing in someone else for makeup."
But this happens every single day, no matter what we are doing. We need to organize the products in our stock room? Well, it's a good thing she "used to be a professional organizer" and "everyone" at her previous job always wanted her to be the one to organize the stock room because she does such a better job than anyone else. Our social media manager, Lila, models our hair extensions for our social media because that's her job, but Carrie is constantly trying to take Lila's place and model for our social media accounts, citing her "years of modeling experience." Etc. It is exhausting to constantly have to find gentle ways to tell her to stay in her lane.
- Her health issues are her biggest topic of discussion with our team, and occasionally with clients too. At this point, she has probably told me that she has at least 40 or 50 disorders, including disorders that do not exist. For example (again, making this up to preserve anonymity), she claimed that she got cancer from a bee sting. It sounded so outlandish that I looked it up later, and the CDC, WHO, American Cancer Society, etc. all say that there have been zero reported cases of transmission of cancer through bees in human history.
Sometimes the things she says about her health seem like they could be disturbing to our clients or team. She wears a lot of rings on her fingers, and she tells people that she has to wear the rings because if she doesn't, her fingers will all pop out of their sockets. Since she is working on their hair with her hands, this seems to me like an odd thing to say. But it doesn't seem like our clients care.
Why I'm writing this now
Two recent incidents have caused me to write this post.
(1) We were in a team meeting recapping our successes from the previous week. Carrie reported that she was very proud of a particular extension application because the client hadn't originally wanted those extensions, but Carrie offered them as an alternative, and the client absolutely loved them. I was taken aback by this because I had been the one to pull those extensions out and offer them to the client. I knew she had not done it, but she seemed to sincerely believe she had. It wasn't that she was trying to take credit for something, it was clear that she "remembered" something that didn't actually happen. It troubled me.
(2) I wanted her to begin working on a new service. I had repeatedly asked her if she had ever done this particular service, and she said no every time. While I was teaching her how to do it, I remarked that there are two ways of doing it: by hand or with tweezers (with tweezers being the much more common method). I told her I was faster doing it by hand because I've been doing it for 30 years, but most people did it with tweezers. She immediately responded that she too was much faster when doing it by hand, even though she had told me at least 3 times that she had never done this particular task before.
After that conversation, I became really concerned about her honesty vis-a-vis this role. I knew she was lying and embellishing about other topics, but I assumed she was simply insecure, and it would go away as she grew more confident in her role at my salon. But these incidents made me feel like I could no longer trust her with job-specific tasks.
At the same time, I am concerned that she's just so annoying to me personally that that is coloring all of my interactions with her and assessments of her.
What are the benefits of keeping her?
She does a very good job at the core of her role, which is providing hair extensions. Most of our clients seem to really like her. And that is what I hired her for. I don't have any issues with her provision of services to clients. She is genuinely a VERY kind and sweet person.
Her comments do not seem to be affecting the rest of the team. They take her at her word. They don't spend much time with her because their roles are largely remote, and they work in the salon on the days that we don't take clients, so Carrie isn't there.
I have gotten to the point where I have stopped holding our biweekly staff meetings because I spend most of the meeting time trying to come up with creative yet kind ways to shoot down the irrelevant and weird things she brings up.
My mother has a personality disorder, and I'm really worried that I'm having an excessively bad reaction to Carrie because some of her behaviors remind me of my mom. That's not fair to Carrie at all.
I would love any insights you may have if you've ever managed someone like this. And if you've read this far, you are a saint!