Bus Cleaning
Sometimes, to make room for the right people on your organizational bus, you’ve got to get the wrong people off. Actually, even if you have room, you still must get the wrong people off of your bus. The old adage about one rotten apple spoiling the whole bunch is true. Your organization will not reach the levels of performance that it is capable of if you’ve got the wrong people on your bus.
I do not mean to make light of removing people from your organization. These people that need to go are husbands, wives, mothers and fathers that have mortgages and diapers to pay for. Losing their job can be a catastrophic event in their lives. That is why I’m going to teach you how to give them every chance possible to stay on your bus and if they have to leave, how to send them off with the best possible chances for success in their next endeavor.
The hardest part of this is that the people who must go because they are not a values match are often high performers. Think of the sales representative who is great at landing the big contract but makes life miserable for everyone else because of the way he treats fellow employees. Attorney and labor law expert Joel Greenwald refers to these types of employees as “toxic high performers”, and they can be the hardest employees to remove from your organization. Not only because you’ll lose their talent, but also because it can be difficult to justify firing a high performer.
When culture fit is the primary reason for firing an employee the final meeting with the employees ends with a statement like “This isn’t a good fit” or a something similarly vague. This leaves the high performer to fill in the void with ideas like discrimination or some equally illegal action.
Why is this? Because very few organizations document their culture with purpose and core values statements. Even fewer make their values an integral part of how they do business and how employees are evaluated. Greenwald states that the best organizations use culture as a both a sword and a shield, a way to improve performance and mitigate the risk of toxic high performers.
As we discussed in a previous post, an organizations’ core values drive its culture. Organizations must make their core values a part of everything they do. Below are the steps you must take to make values an integral part of how your organization operates:
- State Your Values Plainly – In job descriptions and recruitment literature. Make sure everyone knows how important your values are to the success of a candidate.
- Measure For Values – As part of your regular (twice a year at a minimum) performance review process, make sure employees know how they are performing on their values goals as well as their sales or other performance metrics.
- Create Improvement Plans – This is where you give good people and high performers a chance to fix anything that is going wrong. This is also why I recommend performance reviews at least two times per year – who wants to wait a year to document and go to work on a problem? Give your people the opportunity to improve. Its fair and it’s the best thing for your business.
- Fire Well – If you’ve followed the 3 steps above, your employee will not be surprised when you finally decide you need to part ways. Help them with the transition and they will return the favor. Everybody loses when the HR director unexpectedly meets the victim in their office with a box to clean out their desk.
Follow these rules and you will build a lasting culture that can survive the ups and downs of the occasional bad hire and help you move the wrong people out of your organization with dignity and a greatly reduced chance of litigation. Don’t forget to review our previous post to improve your odds of making a good hire.
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Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/aidan_jones/2688423910/
Filed Under: Performance Excellence, Strategy + Execution
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