The Right People
No Comments »From “If You Don’t Make Waves You’ll Drown“: (I added some emphasis)
Someone once said that people are your greatest asset. That someone didn’t tell the whole story. People are not your greatest asset; the right people are. The wrong people are your greatest catastrophe, and mediocre people are your greatest drain on resources. Bearing this in mind, consider the following:
1. You will never build a great organization around marginal people. Working with weak people drains you. Investing in weakness at the expense of leveraging strength breaks your momentum, lowers morale, and misuses resources. It causes you to play endless games of catch-up.
Some of the people you’re retaining shouldn’t be on board in the first place, because they’re just plain bad at what they do. And even if you manage to invert bad you don’ get good: You just get not bad, and how far do you think you can take your organization with a troupe of “not bad” bunglers? It’s time to face reality about your people and to stop seeing them as you’d like them to be. Some of them have too far to go. They’re failing, and even if you improve them the opposite of failing is not excellent; it’s merely passing. And as I recall, passing grades in schools started with a D-, and you rarely, if ever, bring a D- up to an A. The lesson? You cannot build an elite company if you spend priority time with problem people. Instead, you must spend priority time with “potential” people. Otherwise it’s like going to a horse race and betting your life savings on a nag, just to improve its self-image; seemingly noble but ultimately stupid.
That “betting your life savings on a nag… seemingly noble but ultimately stupid” really resonates with me. In fact, I would go so far as to say that you shouldn’t try to change anyone. Offer them the leadership style that fits their work ethic, stand back and see what happens. If it improves, great – if not, get them off the bus as fast as you can.