FIRING

Many people remember the first two of Jim Collins’ three directives in his book, Good to Great: get the right people on the bus and get them in the right seats.  Collins stressed that you also must get the wrong people off the bus.  Know why? Because they are the biggest deterrent to the right people.  This is the message of Chapter 8.

Chapters 5 – 7 guide you through the hiring and alignment of your team members, and it will seem like hard work.  It is hard, and it takes time, but the penalty for not being effective in the building of your team is that you will never reach your potential.  Now comes the hardest task of all – occasionally, taking someone off the team.

Chapter 8 is built around the case study of a team that must say goodbye to a long-time teammate. I offer a five-step process to undertake when it becomes clear that a person must be excused from the team.  I include a true story that happened to me – my conversation with someone who was taken off a team many years ago, and how they reflect, positively, on that event today.

None of this makes the challenge easier.   In my mind, it comes down to a leadership issue.  There’s an old saying: Managers do things right, but leaders do the right things.  In a wrong-person-off-the-bus situation, a manager holds meetings and write memos related to improving performance and offering counseling resources.  They might move roles around in hopes of getting the person in the right seat.  These tactics may work, and they should be considered doing things right.  However, when the time comes, a leader will do the right thing – make the decision to say goodbye.

For some clients, it has been helpful to define this situation like an investment scenario.  Which of the available assets will cause the investor’s equity to grow the fastest during the holding period? For a team leader, the comparable question is how well suited is this person to help the team progress toward our goals? When a leader asks this question, it forces the issue – what are our long-term goals?  How does each member of the team contribute to those goals?  If the leader decides that this teammate doesn’t significantly contribute, then, like the investor – he or she chooses an alternative investment.  The leader and the investor both do the right thing: choose the best option for the future.

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