Don’t Hire Someone to Fix an Underperformer
One of the hardest things to do as a manager is to fire someone. It sucks. I have done it many times, and it never gets easier. But it is one of the most important things a manager can do when someone is dragging the team down.
A sign of ineffective management is when a manager retains an underperformer, but what’s even worse is when they “layer” an underperformer. This means hiring a new person in between themselves and the underperformer. All that does is saddle the new person with the weak person, setting them up for failure in their new role. It brushes the problem under the rug and makes things worse, not better. And really, it’s incredibly unfair to the underperformer, who would probably be happier and more productive in a different role or even at a different company. I am constantly on the lookout for layering, since it can easily and quietly happen – especially at a fast-growing company.
Recently, one department lead proposed creating a new, more senior role in her team because we weren’t seeing the results we wanted from the middle manager. Her proposal also included keeping that middle manager in the hope that the new hire could boost her performance. We continued to invest in the underperformer because she was a nice person who tried really hard, and we didn’t want to give up. Perhaps she could be more successful in a more junior role? Maybe we were asking too much of her? A few months later, we ended up letting her go anyway because hiring someone above her didn’t solve the root issue: performance.
In high-growth organizations, sometimes you have a junior person who accelerates into a management position she just isn’t ready for, and you need to bring in a more senior person to guide that rising star. That’s a good layering move because you’re giving the incoming person a talented team member and the existing employee some much needed guidance. But when the more senior person is brought in to fix the underperformer, both are worse off.
Despite being counterproductive, layering underperformers is, unfortunately, a common practice across companies. Why? Because most of us are generally nice people, and we want our colleagues to succeed. We fear the short-term pain of filling their vacant position, and we want to save our investment. But when we keep underperformers, we create pockets of mediocrity in our companies that stymie productivity, burden our teams and slow the company down. Don’t prop underperformers up with talent; let them go and make room for additional rising stars.
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Procurement Professional
7ySometimes, I agree, the job may just be plain wrong for a person, however, if they've been promoted into a role, we must've spotted talent and potential right? To me, firing someone is way too easy. As a good manager, you first need to understand why the person is underperforming and then look to rectify the causes of that. But that requires effective communication.and positive intervention. Layering with a talented individual in between may very well be the answer. Some people learn best through shadowing and learning from other's experience. Many studies confirm that the best training you can get is OTJ training, so I definitely endorse this practice as a way to helping an underperformer and I wouldn't necessarily call it out as ineffective management. Reason being that you can't be a master or.expert on everything, so in certain cases it's good to bring in someone who can coach or mentor an underperformer and hopefully, teach the underperformer the necessary skills and courage to raise their game. But this needs to be explicit and finite in terms of time, which is something a lot of managers get wrong.
Finance Leadership | Budgeting, Forecasting, & Reporting | Data Analytics | Project Management
7ySometimes it is just a matter of fit. The skills and history of solid performance may all be there but if the company/departmental culture does not fit the employee then it is a bad match. An employee really has no idea what the company culture will be like before he is hired but he must do all he/she can to be informed and research to prevent a mismatch. At the same time, the company must be transparent on who this person will report to, the managing style and what the company is expecting.
| Strategist | Entrepreneur |
7yGreat article
Finance Leadership | Budgeting, Forecasting, & Reporting | Data Analytics | Project Management
8yI agree. But most companies do not think that way. It is easier to fire a symptom than to treat the disease.
Executive and Personal Coach | Leadership Development
8yAs coaches we often get hired to fix underperformers. This is not "layering", but providing the individual with a resource that the company may not have, which is identifying the cause of poor performance and providing proven behavioral solutions. Many times we have seen the cause of poor performance be a direct result of unfulfilled management promises, but that is not always the case. Sometimes the employee needs an "attitudinal" adjustment, typically based on erroneous assumptions promulgated by fear. If we can get to the root of that and break through it we've saved a contributor and fostered a long-term relationship that otherwise would have been dashed. If not, the fired employee is left to take the same fears and behaviors into the next position, and the cycle repeats itself. We fail at development and it's lose/lose. And with the cost of turnover being anywhere from 25% on up of annual labor cost, our work can provide serious ROI and, more importantly, save relationships. 1. Hire the right people in the right seats. Since leadership is a result of behaviors, getting the right people in the right seats is significantly dependent on matching the behaviors of the prospect with the needed behaviors of the position and its growth. Hiring a high energy or high social person into a one that requires one to be lower can be disastrous, yet we often see this mismatch. 2. Train everyone on how to communicate. In all our consulting work one of the key issues that continues to arise over and over again is lack of successful and engaging communication, or worse, that someone is afraid of communicating. Is the intention of the communication being interpreted correctly? A contractor client of ours asked a challenging laborer what the directions he had just told him, and the response back was far from the owner's intent. 3. Train everyone in responsibility for thinking, feeling, and behaving. This is a challenging concept because it runs so deep in all of us. Anger and resentment are the byproducts if irresponsible thinking. Make sure everyone knows their responsibilities in their thinking. Seems obvious, but we experience it in a lot of people, and this one concept changes them and the company in significantly positive ways. 4. Develop, develop, develop. And then develop some more. Develop your self, and develop everyone in the organization. Per Lencioni: "Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare."