Every Leader Knows This, but Only Great Leaders Do It.
There is a playbook. Do you have the courage to follow it?
Every book about building a great business highlights a very specific (and unique) leadership trait. Transformative companies and the leaders that build them understand the need to relentlessly recruit and find the very best talent available. All of them. Every single one.
Stop me if you have heard this: “Every new hire should raise the bar. Once you have great talent, you should do everything possible to retain it”.
Everyone knows this. It is not a secret to anyone. It is not unique for a leader to demand high talent density in their organization. It is the courage to maintain a high talent density that is unique.
It sucks to realize you made a bad hire. It’s easy to give the bad hire some grace and extend their runway to see if they can figure it. You tell yourself it’s your job to train them up and find a role where they can contribute. It feels good. It feels like the right thing to do. It’s not.
The right thing to do is decidedly not easy.
The right thing to do is correct your mistake, as quickly as possible. Great leaders own hiring misses and take swift action.
Do you know what sucks worse than firing a bad hire? Firing a good hire who cannot keep up anymore. (and let’s not soften it by calling it “exiting” because getting fired is horrible and deserving of the term). This is now a friend that you care about. Your friend has not done anything wrong. Firing them is extremely hard. It sucks a lot worse. Most leaders won’t do it.
Perhaps the company has grown past your friend and they simply produce work that is not excellent. Most leaders will avoid letting that person go. You will try to find a new role more “appropriate” for their skills. You will tell yourself it’s your responsibility to match employees with success. Lord knows I have done it. A good leader takes care of their people, right? Yes, but . . .
Oftentimes the most loving thing you can do is fire them.
Your inaction becomes the organizational norm, and the only people who ever get fired are the extreme cases.
Highly successful companies go hard in the other direction. When you read about Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, etc . . . you see cultures and leaders that ruthlessly strive to eliminate mediocrity. Read anything by Horowitz, Hastings, anything about Steve Jobs, or Jorge Lemann. Same story.
“No one ever fired someone too soon. . . Not firing someone means not moving ahead with the right person that much earlier, you’ve now started the clock of underperformance, and the longer you wait, the longer that clock of lost opportunity is ticking. The longer you wait to fire them, the more compounded success is lost.” -Ben Horowitz
Here’s the point. All of these CEOs have the same playbook. It is the same one as every single company out there. When it comes to talent acquisition the playbook says, “Only hire the best! Retain top talent. Replace average talent with top talent.”
The difference between great companies and mediocre companies isn’t the playbook, it is their willingness to follow the playbook.
When we claim to be an “A” players only organization while allowing teammate Bob to continue to struggle to produce “B” player results we fail Bob, his co-workers, and the company. Bob deserves to work at a place where he is valued and appreciated. It’s your job to provide them with that opportunity.
It is unfair for you to withhold it because you lack the courage to fire them. Bob’s co-workers have known Bob was producing mediocre results for longer than you have. They are frustrated about picking up his slack and wondering why you haven’t moved Bob out yet. The longer Bob stays, the more your culture suffers. Mediocrity gets established as acceptable and you begin the inevitable decline mediocrity demands. You have failed.
Firing a friend is terrible. Good. It needs to be hard. It needs to hurt. It should be agonizing. Don’t let that prevent you from doing what needs to be done though. Be kind. Be honest. Be as gracious as possible. But, be courageous. Your company deserves it.
Great leadership is hard, but it’s not because you don’t know what to do. Maintaining your talent density is the example used here, but it goes beyond hiring and firing. Read enough about the people who have built great businesses and you will see a pattern. There is a playbook, and it is known. The hard part is summoning the courage to do the hard things the playbook requires.
