You must fire, train, or tolerate your people– those are your only 3 choices.
And the HUGE mistake I’ve made is that I’ve tolerated poor performance.
Many of us want to be “kind” to the under-performers– hoping they will improve over time, wanting to avoid conflict.
Often they have extenuating circumstances, so we make exceptions– over and over again.
We may like them and care for them– and they may have so much potential we see in them.
But the result of letting people continue to deliver low quality, ignore (or even openly flaunt) the rules, is that they get used to it.
They become overconfident, aggressive, and entitled– then infecting other people to be the dame. Brad Lea taught me this lesson about people management– because he doesn’t “tolerate”, the only options left are to train or fire. Hire slow and fire fast.
Put 80% of your effort on your high performers and only 20% on the low performers.
Most of us get this wrong, including me– by putting 80% of our attention on the squeaky wheels– the problem causers, understandably. But that means you’re not taking care of the people doing great work– you’re penalizing them and hurting your business, too.
What do you think about this– to fire, train, or tolerate?
