At a recent presentation I gave on workplace culture and our unique employee transition program, an audience member challenged my assertion that it is easy to tell when someone is working or not working out at our company. Our back-and-forth really underscored for me that companies too often run into personnel problems because the employee and employer aren’t clear on goals or the definition of success.
Clarity is critical to success in business. As Patrick Lencioni explains in his bestselling book The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business, when you define your desired outcomes, communicate them clearly and hold people accountable, you eliminate most of the missteps that can lead to failure.
Yet, fit and performance remain gray areas for many business leaders. Situations arise where it’s clear that something has gone wrong, but no one is sure if the problem is with the employee or with management; both parties get upset and the fallout can be messy.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Over the years, I’ve learned there are just three reasons an employee isn’t going to work out, and the first two are pretty black and white.
1. The Hire Is Not A Good Fit With The Company’s Values or Culture
Keeping someone whose views and actions clash with the culture sends a very bad message to the rest of the company. Even if the employee is a top performer, the best companies will just cut the cord once they realize there is a culture or values mismatch. The employee’s performance in the role should not matter if the values are a mismatch. They need to go.
2. The Employee Fails To Meet Clear Objectives
This is also clear-cut. If someone knows what he needs to do and can’t do it, then you really need to make a change. Meeting sales quotas and retaining key clients, for example, are not optional or subjective performance criteria. When someone can’t meet the objectives even after you’ve been clear about them and provided coaching and proper training, the fit is just not right. Letting that employee continue in that role is a failure of leadership and accountability.
However, if a person is a good fit for your company’s culture, it can be worthwhile to consider if she is in the right role. At Acceleration Partners (AP), we have had a lot of success moving people into roles that are better aligned to their skills. Many have gone on to become top performers in other areas of the company.
One of the ways we get to this understanding is through open conversations and extensive personality testing (e.g., DiSC, Myers Briggs, StrengthsFinder) to figure out how a person likes to work and where his or her strengths lie. We have also created Mindful Transition, a program that helps employees move on to other opportunities elsewhere if that is the best outcome for them.
The third reason an employee won’t work out is where things get complicated. If you want to make all your people decisions quick and easy, this is the place to focus.
3. The Employee Has A Different Definition Of Success From The Company
These are the sticky situations where an employee thinks he is doing a great job, but the manager doesn’t see it that way. Typically, this disconnect is an outgrowth of a poor hiring process. Chances are, the people were not on the same page at the start—perhaps because multiple people had input on what success for the role might look like. The new hire was expected to be all things to all people and was basically set up for failure. This is a very hard situation to manage as there is a lot of mutual dissatisfaction and distrust and no clear next steps.
At AP, we made this painful mistake in the past and never wanted to do it again. So, we adopted a best practice of creating job listings that are outcome-oriented; we list exactly what success will look like six and 12 months out. Candidates essentially get to see their performance review in advance which they made the decision to sign up for; there are no surprises. We also use a set of business tools (Entrepreneurial Operating System) to ensure all employees are on the same page at all times in terms of goals, deadlines and responsibilities. This system aligns expectations.
The first two reasons to part ways with an employee involve objective criteria, and in those cases it’s relatively easy to make the right decision for your business. But if your company is struggling to address high turnover or has a lot of other messy personnel issues, hone in on reason No. 3. If you do, you will find that far fewer hires “don’t work out” once you have clarified expectations and get everyone on the same page.
Robert is the founder and CEO of Acceleration Partners. Join 30,000 global leaders who follow his inspirational weekly Friday Forward at www.fridayfwd.com or invite him to speak.
