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I've worked with someone like this before -- not qualified for the position, making up ridiculous stories instead of admitting error or ignorance -- and the motivation was fear... a terror that admitting any mistakes would mean losing the respect of co-workers (a moot point, unfortunately) and/or the job itself.
I don't know if there's a good way of saying "we won't fire you for making mistakes, but we're on the verge of firing you for not admitting you make them," but that might be the message you need to get across. Perhaps this writer has been punished, at a previous job, for admitting to any kind of error. You need to find a way to make this person understand that the attitude about the mistakes, not the mistakes themselves, is the issue now.
(And at the risk of repeating myself, let me say once again how happy I am that I'm not in management!!!)
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Tracy Boyington tracy_boyington -at- okcareertech -dot- org
Oklahoma Department of Career & Technology Education
Stillwater, OK http://www.okcareertech.org/cimc
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Although hired for a high-level
position, it turns out the writer's skills are very weak across the boards.
But the real problem is the writer's attitude - it's all someone else's
fault. Rather than owning up to simple mistakes (which nobody cares about
anyway) this person has gone so far as to say Word must've magically changed
the template and also inserted duplicate pages at a later point in the
document. So far, I haven't even been able to approach the real issues
because even the smallest things are met with such defensiveness. The
training department is fed up and I'm ending up having to re-write
everything. My boss is looking at termination, but wants me to make another
effort to salvage the situation.
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