Hiring, Firing, and Personality Styles
Jean had to be let go. Fired. Her big personality, her big mouth, her openly belligerent disrespect for me, and her gossip spreading through our little office left me no choice. There were only about twelve of us in those days and so one bad apple represented almost 10 percent of my entire staff. She was our only salesperson and she was doing well with sales, which made her get confused as to the level of power she had in our little company. I wasn’t scared of her, but I let the trash go on so long that I began to fear what would happen when I let her go. Would I lose clients? Would some of the other team members leave angrily because they were more loyal to her than to me? By being too nice and extending too much grace I had let several layers of misbehavior go on six months too long, and now I was actually having some fear about my business—because of an employee. Ridiculous.
The morning I fired her I got to the office early to pray and rehearse my speech. I had warned her, I had reprimanded her, and I had let this go on way too long. As I sat there watching the early commuters fight traffic outside my office window I wondered to myself how I had let this mess happen and get so out of hand. From that morning meeting with Jean, complete with her attitude, and the process of letting people go in the early days of my business I quickly began to form a philosophy regarding adding and subtracting from my team. I will tell you that when that woman left our company our customers and our team rejoiced. I felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz after she accidentally killed the Wicked Witch. To my surprise all the players celebrated. I started realizing that I was making mistakes in hiring, and even in firing, because I didn’t know what I was doing.
Most businesses are horrible at hiring and firing. Now, years later and hundreds of team members later in my leadership growth, I have become very good at both hiring and, very rarely, firing. I am so good at it that I am convinced this may be one of the most important chapters in this book. Our team is so central to our success that our interaction with them as they come in the door and even as they go out the door is vital, fluid, and very intentional.
Proper hiring creates a good team, and a good team lowers turnover. Turnover is very expensive, particularly in a small business. When you lose a team member, not only is their job not getting done, but oftentimes your job isn’t getting done because you have to stop what you are doing and begin the interview process again. Plus, new team members have to be trained. That takes time away from other tasks, and the new team members take a while to become good at their task, costing you even more productivity. Using the philosophies and process covered here we have lowered our turnover to about 4 percent per year. We measure two kinds of turnover: The first is turnover due to life events like having a baby, getting married, or moving to another city to follow a spouse’s new job. Since I have a young crew, a bunch of whom are in their twenties, we lose people mainly to life change. The second, turnover of people we fire, or who quit for a “better job,” is less than 4 percent. Our overall turnover rate runs about 9 percent per year.
Turnover is not only expensive due to lost productivity but also causes morale problems. When your team likes and respects each other and someone leaves, it actually hurts emotionally. People are sad when “family” moves on. Also, a self-fulfilling prophecy can begin to unfold when your team starts to wonder if something is wrong, something they don’t know about, and is causing all the people they love to leave. Sometimes a company creates negative momentum and actually starts losing people just because they are losing people. Turnover is dangerous.
Team members leave, or are let go, most often because they should never have been hired in the first place. The fact that someone got on your team who should never have been allowed in the building is your fault. Once I realized that team problems were my fault I started trying to build a process and a philosophy to stop that problem so we could get back to doing something productive.
The first and often the largest mistake we make in hiring is we don’t take enough time. Take more time! Take more time! I know how it is and especially how the first few hires are—you are going along doing business and you look up and realize eighty-hour weeks are becoming a way of life. So you have a revelation: “I need to hire someone to help me.” So you begin to hire people quickly because you don’t have time to actually do an interview. In your rush to get some help you are extremely naive and actually think after one or two quick interviews that you found someone who will love and rock your baby business with you. Very quickly after they enter your life you find they don’t care as much as you or work as hard as you, and hey, they don’t even show up on time. If you keep this up you will have a building full of employees. You remember the definition of an employee, don’t you? An employee is someone who comes late, leaves early, and steals while they are there. You don’t want employees, you want team members, and the process of adding team members requires you to slow down the hiring process. Take more time!
The person hired properly will perform better, will not cause problems, and will be more likely to stay. Once we realized it is much easier and takes less time to go through a lengthy hiring process rather than rehire the position three times, our quality of life got better. When you work with fired-up, talented people who love what they do, you have more fun than trying to gather a bunch of turkeys together and whip some work out of them. The process of building and nurturing a team that has low turnover takes more time per person employed. But it takes much less time than interviewing, on-boarding, training, and then firing three turkeys before you luck into a good person.
I don’t care if you are hiring entry-level, low-skill positions or white-collar executives. Each of these human beings has a tremendous ability to bring positive attitudes and infectious hard work to your team. Each of these human beings also has the tremendous potential to keep everyone off balance with so much drama that the place starts to feel like a soap opera. Regardless of the level of team member you are adding, the pay scale, or the job to be done, you must take more time. Make sure you get the rock stars and keep the turkeys out.
I am convinced the mistakes we have made in hiring have cost us hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of dollars in lost productivity and in lost opportunity. I do know that as we have gotten better and better at attracting, hiring, and keeping rock stars, our life and profits have gotten considerably better.
We use at least twelve components in our hiring process. It takes an average of six to fifteen interviews and an average of ninety days from initial contact to hire. If you had told me to do that when I started I would have laughed and found some reason that all this didn’t apply to me and my business. If you are thinking this is overkill I have a challenge for you: try this process, or your version of it, for your next five hires and see if you don’t lower turnover and drama as well as increase the quality of your life and the lives of the rest of your team. Just try something new.
Our goal is to find out someone is not a good fit before we hire them. My human resources director has a great saying. He says we have a 95 percent turnover, before we hire them. That means if you make it to the second interview you still only have a one-in-twenty chance of getting hired.
As a person of faith I ask God to send me who He wants to work with me to do the work He gave me. I also ask God to keep the crazy people away so I can get my work done. Sometimes He answers that prayer. LOL. If you are not a person of faith at least spend some quiet time in the morning thinking about the type of person you want to work with every day and the type of person you don’t want on your team.
Several members of our team have weird stories of how they connected with us at just the right time, and in just the right way, to be hired on our team. Some of the circumstances are such bizarre and unusual methods of getting a job that they are convinced God sent them. Over the years I have become thoroughly convinced they are right.
We have found most employment advertising to be a waste of money. We are not trying to collect thousands of résumés. We are instead trying to find someone who fits on our team and wants to join our crusade. We do have an employment section on our website and you will find our ads full of enough information for you to rule yourself out.
You can rule yourself out if you see the position for video editor pays in the $45,000 range and you want to make $90,000. If that is the case you would only want to work for us if you are brain damaged, and in that case we wouldn’t want you. You can also rule yourself out if the position clearly states that you must have certain proven skills, like “Two years of accounting experience required” or “Must know ColdFusion.” Put too much info in your ads wherever you run them so people can rule themselves out and you don’t have to.
We also add sarcastic and smart-aleck things to our ads to represent the kind of culture we have. Our ad might say: “Just because your mother likes your family blog doesn’t make you a writer; you really must have professional writing experience,” or “Two years of sales experience needed, Girl Scout cookies doesn’t count,” or “We might be wearing blue jeans and flip-flops, but don’t let that fool you, we work our tails off. If you want to join a team that gets it done then you better know how to make things happen.”
By far our most successful hiring procedure is referrals from existing team members. We pay our team a bounty of $250 in cash, handed out and applauded in a staff meeting, when we hire someone they sent us and that person makes it through the ninety-day probation period. And every time we hand out that money in a meeting we remind the whole group to be very careful to send us only their friends who are rock stars and not to send us friends who are turkeys or drama queens. We remind our team that we likely will discover their bad friends aren’t a fit and we won’t hire them, but more importantly, we have a great place to work, so they shouldn’t mess it up with their friends who are crazy—and we all have some crazy friends somewhere. Everyone laughs and nods, and I say, “Send only good people, but remember money is on the line, so do send us those good people.”
Of course you will have to be doing the things in the rest of this book so you create a culture and a company that your best people will want their brightest friends to work for. They won’t send you their contacts if they don’t trust you and don’t love everything about working there. More on this later.
You should never hire someone in one interview. Ever. Your first interview should be a quick “get to know you” conversation to begin the process or cull someone out quickly.
My team quit letting me do interviews long ago because I am awful at it. The worst thing I do if I am not really careful is spend two hours telling you how great we are, only to discover later that you are not even qualified. I love people and I love what we do so I talk about it too much. It is oxymoronic because I can take a call on my talk radio show and get you to tell me things in two minutes that you never should in front of five million people, but I am a crummy interviewer.
My HR director is a fabulous interviewer, as well he should be. He can learn all kinds of things in thirty minutes that you never intended to tell him. No tricks or fancy interview questions. He just listens and asks questions. He says in a drive-by thirty-minute interview, use the ratio of two ears to one mouth. Listen twenty minutes and talk for ten minutes. Listen much more than you talk. Don’t go thirty-one minutes; cut it off, because you two will be talking again, many times, if there is a reason.
This is the most worthless of the twelve components to a good hire, but it’s still needed. You need a résumé so you can quickly get to the formal training someone has that pertains to the position you are filling. Other than that a résumé is a great place to begin several conversations where you will discover what the person is really about.
Since most people have the good sense to put down only references who will say good things about them, references are generally useless. We do check references because if the person is stupid enough to list references who don’t know we are going to call, or stupid enough to list references who aren’t going to say nice things about them, then we consider them too stupid to hire.
Too many companies use testing tools as a key component in hiring. You and your leaders need to have enough relational intelligence to determine who to bring on without giving undue weight to some kind of “magic test” that will tell all.
However, we do use testing tools as one of the indicators of a good fit in hiring. The tool we always order after the second or third interview is the DiSC personality test. This tool gives us a quick look at the personality style of the person. We want to see if their style fits with the job, how their style will fit with the team they will join, and how they will interact with the style of their immediate leader. This is a quick test of twenty-something questions that just takes a few minutes, but it reveals with fairly good accuracy a person’s tendencies.
I avoid IQ tests and other measures of raw intelligence because they are not good indicators of success. Malcolm Gladwell found in his research for the book Outliers that IQ or GPA is seldom an indicator of success. A greater indicator is relational intelligence. The ability to get along with others and work with others to achieve shared goals is huge as an indicator of winning.
The D stands for “dominance.” A dominant person is a very task-oriented, hard-driving person who looks to solve problems and is always asking, “When?” Gary Smalley, an author on marriage, assigns animals to these styles and calls this person a lion. They roar, they overlook details, they can hurt people’s feelings, but they really get stuff done. They are quick to act and make decisions easily. And if they don’t like that decision they will make another. They make great team members because they will always keep the company moving. About 10 percent of the public is the D personality.
The I stands for “influencer.” This person is people oriented, fun, outgoing, and generally a party looking for a place to happen. They are very concerned about people and are always asking, “Who?” They are expressive, persuasive, lose focus on tasks, and make decisions quickly, usually because they are impulsive. Smalley calls these people otters, always playing and playful. They are really fun to be around and have on your team. About 25 percent of the public is the I personality.
The S stands for “steady.” This person is unbelievably loyal and stable. They detest conflict and are paralyzed by it. They love people and are concerned about how everyone feels. They are a team player, understanding, and amiable. Smalley calls this type a golden retriever, and everyone should have one as a friend. They will be with you to the end and love you in spite of your flaws. They are slow to make decisions because they always want to understand “why,” and they want to make sure no people are hurt because they always avoid conflict. They are great team members because they are very loyal and steady. About 40 percent of the public is the S-quadrant personality.
The C stands for “compliant.” This person is all about details and is consequently very analytical and factual and loves the rules. You must know the rules and follow the rules if you are a C style. Not following the rules is not only wrong, it represents a failure of integrity. These people can seem rigid and resistant to change, but they will always have high levels of competency. They are slow to make decisions because they must first gather all the facts and details and they are always asking, “How?” People are not so much on their radar and if people show up they should be studied. Gary calls the C personality the beaver; these people are very industrious and all about business. They make excellent team members, and you for sure want some in your accounting department. About 25 percent of the public is the C personality.
We never use this test as a deal breaker on a hire. What we are trying to do with all twelve of these components is to establish a pattern toward or away from hiring. We never hire someone when half of the twelve go poorly. And we almost never rule someone out exclusively on one of the twelve.
Your organization needs some of every personality or you will have serious problems. My three closest leaders and I fall in each of the four quadrants respectively, which ensures that when we make group decisions they are generally wise. If we were all one type or another we would miss all kinds of elements.
There are a few personalities that are wrong for certain positions. You probably don’t want an I personality who hates details, loves people, and is impulsive in your accounting department. So the first question we ask ourselves is how the potential hire’s personality is going to fit the position interviewed for.
The second thing we are looking for is how they will fit the chemistry of the group they will be working with. If the group is all high energy and artistic, how is a C personality who loves rules going to fit in? They might, but the strengths and weaknesses of the chemistry need to be discussed as part of the hiring procedure.
The last thing we are looking for is how they are going to work with their leader. If you are hiring a sweet young lady who is a high S and doesn’t like conflict to work directly for a gruff old D who is blunt and task oriented, she is going to cry every day. That won’t work. I am a high D and right on the line of I, so my assistant, who has been with me for years, is perfect as a C with some S. She complements me well but also we share some tendencies. You also want to keep in mind that lazy is not a personality style, it is a character flaw. Having no initiative is not a style, it is a character flaw. I mention this because we have had people who didn’t want to work hard quit and tell us their personality style didn’t fit in. Not true; it was that we require a huge work ethic and they didn’t have that character quality. Lazy is not a style.
I have trained my leaders to spend time with people in the hiring process to determine if they play well with others. That will be the only way you can build a great culture and actually enjoy your team.
In most cases you are going to be working really closely with the people you hire. For goodness sakes, don’t force yourself to work with people you don’t like or don’t have anything in common with. There are some people you don’t need to hire—simply because you don’t like them. That is good enough.
The last time I hired a personal assistant George W. Bush had just been elected president for the first time. And by the way, I am a huge W fan, which matters in this story. Some of my team had interviewed and narrowed down the candidates to two. One lady came to interview with me and she was very qualified. She had been the personal assistant to the president of a Fortune 100 company and she was very polished and buttoned-down. As I was talking with her I asked which of our books or classes she was familiar with. She said she had listened to me give financial advice on the radio but hadn’t read any of the books or been through the classes. That was fine, but it just told me she would have a learning curve about what we do.
Then she jumped in and offered that the advice that we give, helping people with their money, was going to be sorely needed in America now that we had “elected that clown George W.” Wow, she was picking on a guy I like. You don’t have to agree with me on everything to work on my team. Heck, we’ve even hired a few Alabama football fans, and I think I saw a Florida Gators shirt the other day, so that is a sign our screening procedures need to be stepped up. (Just kidding, in case you can’t tell.) But the moral of the story is my personal assistant works in virtually every detail in my life, so they should be someone I really like. Plus, if you are going to interview with a CEO and every opinion he has ever had is somewhere on the Internet, have enough sense to do some research before you go to the meeting. Had our candidate in question done that, her interview might have lasted longer.
I would rather pay my money to, and spend time with, people I actually like.
Hire people you like; you will be trusting them and spending lots of time with them. There is a ridiculous unwritten rule that if you are professional enough you can overlook vast differences in value systems. You might, but why bother? I would rather pay my money to, and spend time with, people I actually like.
We hired a young lady who had been working with troubled teens in a program at the YMCA and before that had been involved with a teen ministry called Young Life. We did not hire her to work with retirees; she is in our youth resources department. And please don’t ask her what she does; if you do, an hour later you will leave exhausted, because she is so very fired up about helping teens learn to handle money. She is a rock star partly because she lights up when the subject comes up. For her it is just a bonus that we pay her; she would practically volunteer because she loves, and is passionate about, her role on our team.
When you start talking about the position or when the candidate starts talking about the position, do they light up? Does the mere thought of getting to do the work at hand fire them up? Or are they just looking for a J-O-B? If all they want is a paycheck you will never keep them happy.
We are looking for people to plug into the opportunistic motivation and the philosophical motivation of what we do. We are a successful, moving, and growing company that represents a great business opportunity for team members. Someone joining our team can grow with us, and that is how you should present any position within your team. They need to love the business orientation and speed with which we operate, or they won’t fit in.
A potential team member should also fit with the philosophy of what you do. Since I am obviously an unabashed Christian lots of people of faith love that aspect of what I do. Someone should be able to embrace the “loving people” part of our philosophy to fit in with our team.
We have found that people we hire who don’t possess some of each of the opportunistic and the philosophical understanding of our company don’t last, because they don’t fit in. I have had nice Christian people come to work for me because somehow they got the idea “Christian” is code for “don’t have to work hard.” They were in for a big surprise. They must have thought we sat around all day long singing “Kumbaya.” One lady quit because she said we were all about making money. My response to her was that I noticed she kept cashing her paychecks, so she must be all about money too. On the other side of the coin we have had people join us who were only excited about making money, so when we stopped what we were doing and helped some hurting people, it didn’t compute in their brain. They didn’t fit in either. You have to have both components to fit my company.
From chapter 2, you know to have a mission statement for your business, and you should build a personal mission statement as well. Very few people are nerdy enough to come to us for an interview with their personal mission statement already done. However, we do show people our mission statement in the interview process and if they go through the whole process and are hired, we require everyone to build a personal mission statement. We want their statement to show how the position they accepted is them living their dream.
Did you know that if you hire people who are broke they don’t make good team members? If someone has financial problems they can’t concentrate on work because they are constantly worried about their bills. Broke people struggle at work. I found this out the hard way with one of my first hires. I hired this sweet little lady from my church to be one of our first all-purpose secretaries. I had known her for years and she was so sweet—until we hired her. Then she became the meanest woman I have ever seen. She barked, snapped, and snarled at my other team members and even at customers. I was aghast; we were just starting and I was already a failure as a leader.
So I called her into my office and asked her what her problem was. “I’m stressed out!” was her answer, to which I said, “No kidding! What’s wrong?” It turned out, as I dug into her situation, that she wasn’t making enough to pay her bills. She had a lot of marketable skills and, before she worked for me, had been making really good money but was laid off from that job. When I sat with her and worked up a monthly budget I discovered that I had hired her for $14,000 per year less than she needed to pay her bills. No wonder she was stressed. I couldn’t believe someone would take a job that didn’t pay enough to meet their obligations, especially when she could have gotten a better-paying job and chose us instead. I asked her why she would do such a thing and she told me she believed so strongly in what we were doing that God would provide a way for her to pay her bills. I told her how much we appreciated her. Then I told her that God says she is fired because he can add. We laughed, and since I could not afford to pay her what she needed, and what she was worth, I helped her find a new job.
I never hired another team member, after that day, without first getting a budget from them to make sure that they could live on what we were paying for that position. As a leader it is my job to serve my team well by making sure they can care for their family and meet their obligations with what I pay.
As we go through the different interviews we always go deeper into detail and develop exactly how a team member will be paid. We unpack the benefits we offer and we go over our core values and operating principles in detail before we hire someone.
We will spend a whole chapter on developing creative compensation plans, but for the purposes of an interview, remember that people whose first question is about pay are not people you want. If they are preoccupied by pay and benefits you will never do enough or pay enough to make them happy, because they are just looking for a J-O-B and not an opportunity with work that matters. I have met sharp young people and been disappointed that in the first three minutes of the interview they want to know what I am going to do for them, not what they can do for the team.
Before you even post a position you need to have a written, detailed job description. We call our job description a listing of Key Results Areas (KRAs). You need to define in detail what winning in that position looks like. What are the key touchstones that will make you, the leader, thrilled you hired them?
Writing out the Key Results Areas really helps you to define who you are looking for as well as clearly communicates what the position entails. I am amazed how many times you can hire the wrong person when you haven’t clearly written down what you want them to do. We have hired people who quit when they came on board and discovered what the job really was.
A Key Result Area can be as simple as defining the number of calls and sales volume required in a sales position. It will further define what should happen on that certain number of calls made per week. Our receptionist—our director of first impressions—has as KRA number one: Answer all incoming calls within two rings with a smile because a smile changes the shape of your vocal cords and your face. A customer can hear a smile on the phone. Three rings is unacceptable, because the caller thinks no one is home. And her number two KRA is: No one is on hold longer than seventeen seconds. Because as George Carlin used to say, “Hold is a lonely place.”
This may be the best advice in this whole book. I mentioned in chapter 4, on making the call, that I get Sharon’s input on big decisions, including big business decisions. A hire is a huge decision. The last interview we do is an informal dinner with the department leader and their spouse, and the hire and their spouse. With the first forty people we hired, Sharon and I went to dinner with the hire and their spouse. We started doing this so I could get Sharon’s input and see if she got some kind of feeeeeling about them. This has given us several other great benefits also.
One, we not only get to meet the hire’s spouse and get to know them before they join our team, we can solicit their input on whether they think this position will work for their spouse. You would be amazed by the number of times a spouse, after meeting us and hearing the details of the job, will speak up and say that they don’t think this is a good fit. We just saved ourselves a ton of trouble. Also, we get to tell our story with the spouse and share some of how we run our company and let them say if they think it’s a good fit.
I have a friend I met in radio who is very talented and I kind of always wanted him on my team. He was a bit of a partier, a little on the wild side, but we really like each other so he and I convinced ourselves that we could work together. At dinner, after covering why we do what we do and who we are, his wife made a brilliant statement. She is definitely a country girl and it went something like this: “Y’all are really religious. I don’t think he is going to fit in.” We all nervously laughed because we all knew she was right and the interview was over.
One of the biggest benefits I have found in this process, which I didn’t recognize on the front end, is by doing the spousal interview you will discover if your hire is married to crazy. Have you ever hired a great person whose crazy spouse completely took away their ability to win because they were doing maintenance on crazy? I was interviewing a very sharp young man for our broadcast department and explained to him that our final interview would be an informal dinner with his spouse. A few hours later I got a screaming and cussing phone call from his wife. She blew a gasket at the very thought that she had to be involved in her husband’s hiring. After she yelled and cussed for a minute or two she finally asked me, laced with profanity that I’ll leave out, “Why do you do this spouse interview anyway!” To which I responded, “To find people like you.” That poor guy gets his backbone ripped out every morning and maybe she gives it back to him at night if she hears a noise outside. Either he is a complete jellyfish, their marriage will end up in counseling, or they will get divorced. None of those options sounds like a productive team member. So the spousal interview might help you discover if the person is married to crazy; if they are, stay away.
Once a person is hired, they are on a ninety-day probation and we have very little obligation to them during that time. Likewise, we tell them that our company is on probation with them and they have very little obligation to us during that time. They are welcome to walk in and quit. We probably won’t release them without lots of discussions because we have invested heavily at this point, but we have low obligation. After ninety days though, we take serving our team and working with them very seriously.
The funniest story about probation is the young man we hired into our call center who had owned a landscape company since he was sixteen. Translation: for ten years he had been cutting grass and doing other miscellaneous landscaping duties. He told our leader that he wanted a “real, inside job.” So after going through all the interviewing and other components he was hired and started on a Monday. About eleven A.M., as he was sitting in the call center taking calls, he jumped up, ripped off his headset, and ran out the door. He jumped in his car and drove off. In a few hours our leader got the call from him explaining that he just couldn’t stand to be inside that long. I really gave my call center leader a hard time about not asking if working inside was going to be a problem! Oh, brother.
So that is how we add team members, but what happens when we need to subtract? What happens when team members fail? Team members eventually have to perform or they have to leave. There are only three reasons we find team members failing to the point we have to release them. When someone is failing you should start by determining the root cause of the failure.
At least half of the times we’ve lost people due to underperformance, it was because of a leadership breakdown. I consider hiring someone who should have never been hired a leadership breakdown, so when someone is failing, ask yourself: did you goof with this hire?
Do you have clear Key Results Areas outlined so that the hire actually knows how winning is defined and measured? I have found that sometimes even a year after a person was hired, somehow a clear description of winning had not been clearly communicated. That is a leadership problem, because the poor team member thought they were doing awesome.
Was leadership in place to train and mentor the new person and continue to mentor them into new tasks? I actually had a VP hire a guy and the guy’s first day was the first day of the VP’s two-week vacation. Unbelievable! The poor guy sat around having no idea what to do for two weeks and thinking his new leader was a clown, because he made a clownlike move. When a team member is new, or on a new task, our leadership is there to serve them by training and mentoring them through the newness of the process.
Ask yourself if the failing team member was given the tools to win. Were the environment and all the resources in place for them to win? I actually discovered one time that we were taking two weeks after a hire to get a computer and a phone in place for a new team member. IT and HR got the opportunity to do better planning after that. Now when we budget for a hire in a quarter IT gets started building the computer and ordering the phone weeks before we even know the name of the person who will use them.
You have a honeymoon with a new team member when they are very enthused, excited, and energized. Don’t let all the air out of their balloon by not having a fast track in place for them to enter your team.
Another leadership failure that will cause a team member to fail is unresolved conflict. The S personality style that does not like conflict can be paralyzed by conflict with team members. Early and often, find out about conflict and demand resolution. You will lose good people when you don’t throw water on the drama that is a natural result of humans working together. Part of leading well is creating an atmosphere where justice prevails. That means unresolved conflict is a leadership breakdown.
If a team member has a personal problem that is causing them to fail at their job the first thing you have to do is quantify the problem. Figure out how big the problem is.
A lady on our team walked into my office with tears in her eyes and said, “My baby is sick.” What does that mean? What is the illness? Well, that time the tears were because she was a first-time mom whose child had never been sick with the flu and she’d never had to deal with how the day care reacted. In a couple of days everything was back to normal, no big deal.
When Shauna from our accounting department came into my office one day and said, “My baby is sick,” it turned out to mean her three-year-old had leukemia. We had a whole different reaction. We let her have time off to deal with the chemo, with pay, and did not count it against her vacation. Some of our guys helped to keep their yard cut and some of our ladies cooked their meals, while members of the accounting team rallied around and covered her work. Why? Because that is how I would want to be treated if my baby were sick. Treat your team like family and they will act like family.
Once you know how big the personal problem is you can assess what to do for the team member and what to do about their job while they recover. You may need to pay for some professional help, such as marriage counseling. We have discovered that when a team member goes through a divorce they are useless for at least thirty days before, during, and even after the divorce. Walking emotional zombies are not on their A game. You need to decide whether you can tolerate the lack of performance for a while or whether you need to staff around it.
When dealing with a personal problem, you must see some incremental progress in order to give grace during the downtime. We had a young man go through a horrendous divorce one year after getting married that devastated him. But three months after the divorce he still was not coming back around. We had counseled him and been with him through all the high drama, but he was just wallowing in his sorrow. So I called him into my office and told him that as his friend, not his boss, it was time for him to begin to heal and that he needed to begin to have some good days to go with all the bad ones. He was angry with me, but our little talk started him on the road to healing and now he is in another city, remarried with two cute kids. I am glad for the time he was with us and glad he got better. You have to see that they are going to come back to work after a crisis or you will eventually have to act. Always go too far in extending grace in the case of personal problems because you will never have regrets that way.
If the team member isn’t failing because of a leadership breakdown or a personal problem, then it is usually some kind of incompetence. Keep in mind incompetence isn’t evil; we are all incompetent at something. Quantify the incompetence.
Many times you can pay for some training and/or mentor someone through a rough spot to get them to where they are able to perform. Sometimes, though, the incompetence is a character or a behavior issue. Is there an integrity problem, or are they stealing? In those cases nothing can be done and you should release them immediately. If they have other behavior issues, that is a type of incompetence and you may be able to train them in how to act.
As a hard-charging guy I used to have a tendency to think anyone who wasn’t moving at the speed of Dave was lazy. I have discovered, as my leadership ability increased, that a lot of people I thought were lazy really weren’t, they just didn’t have clear direction. So check first to make sure someone you think is lazy is being led well. But sometimes you will actually encounter someone who is just full-on hound-dog lazy. There is no cure for these folks; just release them as quickly as you can.
The most frustrating type of incompetence I have dealt with is the person who gets their work done but never quite rings the excellence bell, and you come to realize they never will. There are some positions where you can tolerate that, but in a small business there really isn’t any margin for that kind of behavior. I had a man who had been with us for about three years and he could just never get there. Any team that had to work with him would come away frustrated and there was always finger-pointing in all directions. His leader recommended several times that we release him but I wouldn’t because I couldn’t put my finger on an exact behavior that we could demand change for. I like clarity and I always want to give someone clear direction for the change required if they want to stay on the team.
Jim Collins got this guy fired. Jim wrote the book Good to Great. In his chapter about getting the right people on the bus he makes a statement that I have used in finance for years. Jim said to ask yourself this about a problem team member: if you hadn’t hired them yet, would you hire them again? My answer was a quick no, so the next morning we worked up a generous severance package and my really nice but incompetent guy was released. If I would never hire that guy again in a million years, why was I keeping him? I promise you the air in the building changed the next day. It was as if the whole organization had a splinter removed.
Isn’t it weird that we say phrases like “release” or “let go” when it comes to firing? Even the saying “to fire” someone means “to discharge,” which comes from discharging or firing a gun. It is almost as if we were holding something captive and we released it. In truth that is the case, and you will discover when someone doesn’t belong on your team you are doing them a huge favor to set them free. The longer I have led, the more clear this truth has become to me.
Always treat people with dignity and be generous as you set them free, but have the courage to do so and you will actually be friends with some of the people you go through that process with. I have actually gotten thank-you notes many times from people we have set free. Sometimes it is a few months later and sometimes years later, but it is not unusual for someone to send me an e-mail or letter thanking me for how I treated them and telling me how they are actually doing much better now that they are somewhere else.
Just like there are components to hiring there are components to releasing someone properly.
If you discover a character flaw like an integrity problem or stealing, the team member has to leave immediately, that day. If there are other character issues like laziness or things you can’t let happen in the company, you have to act on that as soon as you come to that conclusion. I have zero tolerance for the mistreatment of ladies. The current culture calls it sexual harassment, but I call it trash and won’t tolerate it for one second in our company. I also won’t let a team member stay if they decide to have an affair. If their spouse can’t trust them, neither can I. Those are the types of things that cause someone who has been with us ten minutes, or ten years, to be let go quickly after we discover it. Of course people with other problems like drug use or addictions can’t be part of our team either—gone that day.
The only other time someone is let go quickly is during their ninety-day probation. Once that time is over though, they get the company tattoo and they are part of the family, and they really have to go through many steps to be let go then.
James Ryle says, “Truth without love equals harshness and love without truth is compromise.” Always treat people how you would want to be treated. I had to release a leader who had an affair, and that was really tough. Not only were we friends, but he left a huge hole in my company. He was so broken and so ashamed but still could not stay. We are friends to this day, partly because of how the whole situation was handled. I was honest with him about how hurt and disappointed I was in him—as his friend and as his leader. But I was never angry or condescending, just hurt. He got tons of severance and we are still friends. But he knew he couldn’t work here if he had an affair.
Regardless of the reason for the release, treat people right and with kindness. You are in control and you still have a job; they have neither, so be kind.
Regardless of the reason for the release, treat people right and with kindness. You are in control and you still have a job; they have neither, so be kind.
I have outlined three reasons people fail at their job. The first, a leadership breakdown, should almost never result in someone being let go. If you or your team are screwing up and that is causing the failure, then fix it. The only time your leadership failure should result in someone being released is when you come to the conclusion, hopefully within their ninety-day probation period, that they should not have been hired and can’t do the job. Even then we look to see if we can find a “different seat on the bus”* for that person. If they have gone through our incredible hiring procedure they are our kind of people, and we may just need to put them in a different seat.
The second reason for failure, a personal problem, should also almost never result in someone being released. We don’t shoot our wounded. When we have mercy and give kindness to our team member who is legitimately hurting, we build huge loyalty with the rest of the team. Companies that treat people like a commodity create an “us against them” culture.
A car service driver on one of my media stops told me a wild story. His thirteen-year-old daughter was kidnapped, raped, and missing for thirty days. The police found her wandering delirious at a rest stop two states away. This father called his boss to ask for the day off to go pick up and comfort his daughter. That company said, “If you don’t come in today just don’t bother coming back.” That was the company he used to drive for and they will never have me as a customer. That is so extreme it’s crazy, but people are treated that way by bad companies every day. You can’t shoot your wounded.
The only times we release someone for personal problems is if the problem leaves a customer or a team member at risk, or if there is no incremental improvement. If you are working your way through your junk we will give you a ton of grace, but be climbing the ladder.
Several times since we opened we have discovered a porn addiction with some guys on the team. This filth coming into our offices on my computers makes my blood boil. Plus, I don’t want to put ladies at risk working with some guy who is going places in his mind he should never go. When we discover a team member viewing porn we put in place several severe steps to give them one last chance to stay: no computer, pastoral and marriage counseling, and reports from wife, counselor, and team member that he is getting better and staying clean every week. If he trips once, he’s gone. I am not going to mess with that filth or try to figure out an addict’s lies. We have worked that plan and have managed to keep a few team members, and they have become great guys and great husbands. But most don’t stick with the plan, which means they are released.
Almost all of the releases we have done fall under the last reason for team member failure—incompetence. So the process we use if someone has a behavior or competence problem is gentle, progressive, and has lots of blunt clarity.
When I was twenty-two years old, I worked for a company for three months in their real estate department. My boss was a yelling, cussing, angry jerk. One morning he walked into my office, sat down in front of my desk, and said, “You are fired, clean out your desk, see payroll, and get out of the building.” Honestly, I probably deserved to be fired, but to this day I still have no idea why I was fired, and no amount of asking my boss would get me a reason. Two weeks later my wife of nine months was fired. She worked for a savings and loan as a teller. They asked her to sell a particular kind of loan product and gave her half a day of training on it. A manager from the home office called and posed as a customer to see if she could sell the product. She screwed up completely and was fired the next day. At least we knew why she was fired, but she would really have loved to have been corrected, trained further, and then told, “If you don’t get this you can’t work here.”
So there we sat with both of us unemployed, newlywed, mad, and scared. I have never forgotten those lessons on how to not treat people. Maybe we both deserved to be fired, and maybe neither of us would have made it in those positions if we had been trained, given clarity, and given second chances, but we will never know.
My goal today is to never surprise someone with a release and to give someone every opportunity to change so they can stay on the team. So when there is a problem with a team member’s behavior or competence, we communicate that very clearly and very often.
We start with verbal course corrections that fall under the heading of a reprimand. These reprimands are not some kind of HR file filler where we “write someone up”; they are paternal instructions on how you must adjust in order to stay. It might be as simple as sitting down and reminding someone that our office opens at eight thirty and if they come in at eight forty-five they are a thief. I am paying them and when they are late they are stealing. Ouch. That makes the point, and it’s true. Some people view tardiness as a harmless behavior but when we put it in those terms—that it’s stealing—it helps them see how seriously we view it.
A reprimand done properly should do five things:
1. Be short. Don’t camp out and spend an hour verbally assaulting someone.
2. Be uncomfortable for everyone. If you love reprimanding people you are a bully. You should not avoid, but neither should you relish, giving a reprimand.
3. Attack the problem. Love the sinner and hate the sin. Ken Blanchard, in his classic The One Minute Manager, says to use the “Reprimand Sandwich” when you are doing a reprimand. Praise the person and their good qualities, hit the problem behavior directly and hard, then remind the person of their value to you personally and to the organization.* Praise, problem, then praise again makes a nice sandwich. I have been guilty of serving a reprimand sandwich with no bread, and from personal experience I know it didn’t have the long-term desired effect.
4. Be private. Never reprimand someone in front of someone else; you will lose their loyalty forever.
5. Be gentle. You are teaching and course-correcting in a reprimand, so you owe it to the person to be brutally clear, but you can do that with kindness.
The one I have messed up the most, and seen messed up by others the most, is making sure to do all reprimands in private. Those of us who are busy, passionate people tend to deal with something when it is right in front of us. When your need for the “now” makes you do a reprimand in front of other people, you have seriously damaged your ability to lead the person you just thumped.
I know it is common sense, but what happens when we are in such a hurry to get a particular project on schedule is we feel the need to deal with problems instantly. This is very efficient for the moment and extremely inefficient over time. If you build a great person who is very loyal to you they can run an entire team for you, which is efficient. You will not keep or build people of quality if you jump on their case in front of others. Worse yet, if the person attacked is not a quality individual they will go so far as to sabotage the job as a favor returned for your leadership screwup. I wish I didn’t know this firsthand due to my screwups, but I do.
However, I will tell you that as part of becoming a good leader I haven’t reprimanded anyone in public in years. I have been very intentional about taking a breath, counting to ten, and waiting until I can create a private moment to give a reprimand. That is, until just the other day, when for the first time in many, many years I messed this up again. One of our leaders, who is world-class in her field, really made a misjudgment on a project that left me personally hanging in a mess that I had to clean up. I was not happy and went into her office, where three of her team members were standing with her, and told her everything she had done wrong on the deal. Her team members stood and watched, with very wide eyes, this public reprimand. I woke up about five A.M. the next morning with the huge insight that I was a jerk. First thing, I called all four of them into my office and apologized to my leader in front of her team and explained to them how I had violated a basic rule of leadership, and they should learn from the embarrassment of their inept leader (me) to never make the same mistake. That apology made it somewhat better, but I know you can never take back your screwup completely.
If there is an issue that is causing you, the EntreLeader, concern it should be frequently and clearly discussed and course-corrected. You owe your team member lots of clear, even blunt, communication about what is required to change their behavior.
If you sit down with a salesperson and discuss the fact that you require at least fifty calls a week and their call report is continually showing thirty calls, then they know they have a problem. You can then point out their low closing success as a simple result of low activity. Then if they don’t pick up the pace you have to be very clear that in order to stay in your company they will have to get their calls up, otherwise they will be leaving. Simple, pure, and direct communication done with dignity will help everyone in the conversation know what’s expected.
Many times, when you are constantly reprimanding and correcting, people will get the idea they are not going to make it and leave as a natural result of your clear and constant parameters. When they leave and you didn’t have to release them, you did a really good job leading. My HR director calls this getting them to “participate in the inevitable.”
Occasionally we have to go so far as to put a formal reprimand, in writing, in their file. Usually this is the last chance they get and the paperwork says so. The natural consequence of their behavior or activity not changing is they will be released.
We hired a really sharp young man named Jordan in our customer care center. Jordan was a rock star and broke all the sales records by almost double in just a few weeks. He was incredible. The only problem with Jordan was he couldn’t seem to find his way to work on time. Some companies operate with flex time or the work-whenever-you-want plan, but we don’t. We expect everyone to be at work on time or early and to leave on time. We don’t want to end up with a building full of divorced workaholics. Come to work on time and work your tail off all day long. Novel approach.
My customer care leader sat down with Jordan several times and talked to him about his coming in as much as an hour late. He had a prima donna attitude that if he was selling like crazy his schedule didn’t matter. My leader tried to explain to him that the rest of the team is demoralized when we sanction misbehavior, and we value teamwork above superstars. He would nod his head and agree but two days later come in late. One of the executive VPs finally intervened, but it did no good. I decided I could fix this kid even if my leaders couldn’t. So I prepared the final, written, formal warning for him to sign and called him into my office with his leader. I told him how much he was valued and how good he was, but I was at the end of his coming in late. I explained that the paper he was signing said if he came in late again he would no longer work for us. I asked if he understood and he assured me he did and signed the warning. Just to be sure, I told him to think of the warning as “the box warning” and asked if he knew what I meant. He said he didn’t. I explained that this warning meant if he was late again he should bring a box with him to clean out his desk—because he was fired. He nodded.
Almost two months went by without Jordan being late. I kidded my leaders that they just didn’t have what it took and that I must have the secret to the perfect course correction. But sure enough one morning I looked up at about nine forty-five A.M. and walking through the parking lot was Jordan… carrying his box. At least he got that part right!
My friend John Maxwell, a great leadership author, says, “Sanctioned incompetence demoralizes.” If you as a leader allow people to halfway do their jobs and don’t demand excellence as a prerequisite to keeping their job, you will create a culture of mediocrity. If you allow people to misbehave, underachieve, have a bad attitude, gossip, and generally avoid excellence, please don’t expect to attract and keep great talent. Please don’t expect to have an incredible culture.
We had several public relations and marketing people from a big corporation meet with our team recently. I got the impression they thought they were there to school us, but the result of the day was they became enamored with our culture. One of the ladies said, “Everyone is smiling on every floor and they are all working really hard too.” Another said to me, as they were leaving, that we have the nicest people working for us, and she meant it.
She might have been a little shocked at my response: “Yes, we do have only nice, smiling, and hardworking people here, because if you aren’t and we mistakenly hire you, you will change or we will fire you.” We don’t keep jerks; life is too short to work with them and really way too short to pay them and work with them too.
Seems simple, but it requires that you fight to build an incredible team and culture from the moment you post a position until you celebrate their retirement. Every day every behavior, attitude, and execution has to be led well by a courageous, loving leader.
When our kids were preteens our family schnauzer Scarlett was on her last legs.
Every day every behavior, attitude, and execution has to be led well by a courageous, loving leader.
We swore we had had enough pets and she would be the last—that is, until I saw a pug with a bow on it in a Sears ad. I suddenly had the great idea to surprise the kids with a Christmas puppy. I began to tease them about the best Christmas ever. I put a padlock on the crawl space, where I hammered and worked on nothing to fool them into thinking I had a big project. Can you tell I love being a dad? I teased them about how thrilled they were going to be with the most fabulous gift ever.
We went to Christmas Eve church service, came home, and put the kids to bed so Santa Claus could come. I drove to my neighbors’ to pick up the little six-week-old pug that we had been hiding there for a couple of days. I stored her in her crate all the way in the back of the house, away from the other presents, so her whining wouldn’t be heard. Christmas morning arrived and all the presents were opened, but no big-deal surprise. My kids were a little afraid to appear ungrateful, but finally my eight-year-old son spoke up and asked where “the best Christmas present ever” was. Oh, yeah… so I went to the other end of the house and put the puppy in a box with shipping peanuts in it. When the kids opened the top of the box her little pug head popped through the peanuts like a little alien. They all screamed and then when they realized what it was they squealed with delight.
They named her Angel because even though she was seriously ugly, she was our Christmas angel. She became my little boy’s best friend quickly. Later that summer when Angel was about ten months old we noticed she was having trouble walking.
A quick trip to the vet gave us really bad news. She had an inoperable spinal condition that was going to cause her to lose the use of her back legs and eventually be in pain. We were all heartbroken. Everyone wanted a miracle, but that was not how it turned out. I had to make one of the toughest decisions a parent can make for the good of the sweet little dog. We let her go until we were convinced she was hurting and then the fateful Saturday morning came. The whole family sat on the floor with Angel, playing with her for the last time, with tears running down our faces. Then it was time to go to the vet. The whole family rode there together and they all sat in the waiting room while I cried and stayed with our little Angel.
Some days leadership is unbelievably tough. It requires that you walk through the pain of really rough decisions that are best for everyone in the long term but hurt deeply in the short term. When it comes to releasing someone from your team it is a really tough call if you love people well. Releasing someone should never become too easy, or you are in a danger zone. However, you will learn to pull the trigger gently and with dignity for the good of all involved, your company, its culture, and even the person leaving. Leaders who do this poorly and who don’t act are doing damage to all the players on the team. Have the courage to do the right thing, the right way, at the right time, and you will be on your way to becoming an EntreLeader.
Have the courage to do the right thing, the right way, at the right time, and you will be on your way to becoming an EntreLeader.
* “Different seat on the bus” reference from Jim Collins, Good to Great, p. 41.
* Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson, The One Minute Manager, HarperCollins (2003), p. 52.