3 Employees You Need to Rid Yourself of … Now

Even with all of the due diligence and painstaking research you did to build your team, not every employee works out as you had planned. The longer you hold onto employees that drain your team and your organization, of precious resources, time, and patience, the longer you are putting off the inevitable. However, before you pull the trigger and fire someone, as yourself these questions …

1. Have I provided the employee with the resources and training necessary, or have I helped this employee fail? Failure is not always the employee’s fault. Sometimes you have helped send this employee down the wrong path. Did you communicate realistic expectations, give them the resources they needed to succeed, and set them up for success?
2. Did I hire an employee to do a job he was ill suited to perform? We all want to hire people who we want to work with day in and day out, but an over-reliance on hiring for fit may have caused you to miscast a brand-right employee into the wrong job.
3. If the job changed, either through form or delivery, have you helped your people adapt? When technology changes how we work, when relationships are altered, or when re-organizations change the scope of a job, we need to help people transition into a new reality.
4. Are there structural or operational hurdles that are ensuring my new employee’s failure? Your office is run by a myriad of unwritten rules, some of which your people hide from you with relative ease. If your team has put up walls to ensure your new people fail, nobody will ever succeed that they don’t want to succeed.

If you realize you have been complicit in your employee’s failure, don’t fire them until you fix the problem! Remember, at one point you thought you were hiring someone who was destined for greatness with your company (if you didn’t think this, your hiring practices need some serious work). As the saying goes, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater”. The employee you are considering firing may still be your next superstar, as long as you give them a helping hand to out of the quagmire you helped to create.

However, not every employee you hire will work out as you hoped, and the fact is, your company is only as good as your customers experience it. Here are the folks you need to rid yourself of ... sooner rather than later.

1. No effort, no heart. Sometimes it’s obvious. We try to immediately rid our organization of any employee who doesn’t care. An overwhelming sense of apathy is extremely hard to overcome. Whether you’re leading a start-up or a well-established brand, keeping someone around who doesn’t care about their job, or your success, is a recipe for disaster. The bigger question is, “What happened? How did your hiring process or people development processes fail so obviously?”
2. All effort, no results. The wheels are spinning a million miles an hour, but they can’t seem to get any traction. They are totally sincere, but incapable (or no longer capable) of doing the job that needs to get done. Fortunately, these employees still care greatly about your success (otherwise they wouldn’t be working so hard). They are no longer a right fit for their job. Chances are good that there is place for this miscast employee somewhere in your company. Don’t just immediately cut ties with them. Rather, help them find where in your organization they can still add value. Then figure out what changed in the job. If you are hiring people with job skills for a job that no longer exists, you need to change your hiring processes to reflect your new reality.
3. Poor fit. These are the employees who can’t fit into your company’s culture. Every business has a specific culture unique to them and them alone, and not every culture fits every employee. Some people work better in highly structured environments, while others thrive in more loosely structured environments. Some work better with well-established hierarchies, and some work better in flatter, less hierarchical organizations. Some work better when they are encouraged to take risks in order to learn and grow, while others work better in more risk-averse environments. For your employees who don’t fit into your culture, helping them move on to find somewhere they do fit is better for everyone involved. Once you do, figure out who you are as an organization and then design the processes hire and develop find the right type of people to thrive in your unique culture.

Remember, just because you need to rid yourself of an employee, you don’t necessarily need to fire anyone. Sometimes, the best staffing decision is to keep the person, but find them a job where they can succeed in your company. If you do need to fire someone, do so in a way that helps the departing employee maintain their dignity, and in a way that helps them land on their feet. Remember, the employee you fire today may just become the customer that fires you tomorrow.

Ultimately, you have a choice. You can build an organization who knows who they are, building alignment between their behaviors, expectations, values, and aspirations in order to outperform their potential. Or, you can build an organization who keeps doing what they’ve been doing, hoping things will work out this time, fostering misalignment between their behaviors, expectations, values, and aspirations, constantly underperforming against their potential.

Leading and managing people is not easy. Both skills require you to make difficult choices. However, when you choose to build an organization capable of making difficult decisions, you are well on your way to transforming potential into performance, productivity, and profit.

Scott Brown, MSOL, is the Founder and Chief Engagement Officer at Hardie Consulting, a Fort Lauderdale, FL based management consulting firm.  Scott is a coach, a consultant, an author, and an award winning speaker who has successfully helped countless organizations learn how to meet shifting customer and employee expectations. Follow him on Twitter: @ScottBrownMSOL, connect with him on LinkedIn, visit his company’s website:  www.HardieConsulting.com, and check out his new book, Alignment: How to Transform Potential into Performance, Productivity and Profit, available on Amazon or CreateSpace to learn more about how employee engagement and organizational alignment can become the linchpin to your success.