So I have been at my current company for about 5 years. Nearly 6 months ago I got promoted to be team lead of the team I have been a part of since I started. In the time I have been with the company, the team has grown from ~8 people to now over 30 through a combination of internal and external hires.
I am a team lead so my job is to assign tasks, solve problems, and talk to management and customers. I can’t hire or fire people, but my manager was a previous team lead and manages everyone on my team from an HR perspective.
I have one team member who has been with the company (but not my team) longer than I have, and has some invaluable technical skills. The problem is this person is not motivated at all, and has made clear they are not interested in salary growth or promotions. This person used to work for a different team with a different manager who had a much lower expectations of performance and communication. On my team this person likes to “make their own hours” (i.e. work when no one is around to know if they are working), and will leave things in a broken state for weeks or months, always promising to “get it working” and then taking hours worth of training, or ship production configuration with no testing, then just leave for the day and have others clean up their mess.
At this point this person is costing my team a lot of rework and starting to give us a bad reputation across the broader organization. My manager and I are looking into putting them on a PIP, but in the meantime I still have to task them. Yesterday at 0930 I sent this person an email asking for some work to be done by COB (Close of Business), or let me know by 1400 if that was not possible. I got an email at 1800 that night (after they had left for the day at 1530) that “this can’t be done by COB today” and now there is some consternation from a project lead (understandably).
Should I continue to give this person tasks? My team is stretched thin right now (we have 4 hires lined up before EOY (End Of Year)), so it’s hard to let someone with that skill set “wander” from project to project just charging their time, but it’s also a lot on my team and me to keep giving them tasks that get ignored.
What would be a professional and effective approach to this situation? I still have to hand tasks and projects still have to be completed.
TL;DR I have a member of my team who chronically does not complete their assignments. How can I handle this professionally and effectively without compromising the rest of the team and the projects at hand?