Would you enthusiastically rehire every single person on your team?
If “Yes” is your answer, congratulations – consider yourself either good, or very lucky. Or, perhaps, be worried as you just may be lying to yourself.
Recently I had two conversations with a CEO. On the first one, he said “yes” immediately. On the second, a month or so later, the main topic was how one of them is just not aligned with company values. I believe in his case, it might’ve been the latter. My advice to him was “consider that you may have the wrong person.” Such a message is a bitter pill to swallow, I know, but the only thing I could’ve said in all honesty.
As coaches, we often enter a room and can very quickly identify team members who just plainly shouldn’t be there. Very few teams come out at the other end with the same members they start with. As the company grows, not everyone keeps up and may fall behind. As a result, they start weighing everyone else down. Sometimes, the values of the company evolve to a place where someone doesn’t fit culturally anymore – or perhaps they never did, it just took evolution of the values to surface that dark reality.
How do you find out whether you have such a problem on your team? The first step is to answer to yourself the question in the subtitle in all honesty. Another useful exercise is to imagine you come in one Monday morning and a member of your team announces their resignation. How do you feel at the moment? So often the answer is “relief.” You know you have the wrong person.
The next question inevitably is, why are they still there? Besides just being bad at making tough decisions, or being a victim of the warm body syndrome, usually the answer is some version of “yes, they…, BUT…”
Either we are looking at a person who may breathe company values and culture yet can’t pull their weight, perhaps lacking the energy and the skills for the role they are in. On the other hand we may have someone who is an absolute superstar on paper but drains the energy from everyone around them. “Yeah, he said that and he’s kinda an arsehole, but, his numbers…”. Those team members are the hardest to deal with. Greg Crabtree calls, rather unkindly yet pointedly, the first category the “lovable losers,” and the second “terrorists.” While the first term is self-explanatory, the second one requires a hint – they hold you hostage by their stellar performance. In fact, the original title of this article was “Terrorists and Losers”, but it got frowned upon by the mighty ranking algorithms.
Trust me. The only worse thing than not having someone in a needed or necessary position is having the wrong person there. We always see leaders agonizing over making those hard decisions, fearful of the impact, only to be amazed how much relief comes once the move is made.
Don’t forget – you’re not the only one seeing the problem. Not only do others see it also, but they are wondering, why you aren’t doing anything about it.
So, again – would you enthusiastically rehire every member of your team?
