Take Flight – Business Growth Strategies with Business Coach Dan Holstein

The Cost of Compensating - How To Handle Underperforming Employees

February 01, 2022 Dan Holstein Season 1 Episode 68
Take Flight – Business Growth Strategies with Business Coach Dan Holstein
The Cost of Compensating - How To Handle Underperforming Employees
Show Notes Transcript

We hire team members because we have a role that needs fulfilling and the folks we hire seem to be the best candidates possible. But sometimes these rock stars turn out to just 'ok' or 'so-so' performers.

What to do?

Sometimes as business owners, we start to compensate for a team member's weaknesses by helping them out here and there and picking up their slack - or generally accepting lower performance than is required of the role.

In this week's episode, I share how to stop compensating for your team, and how to bring these people back up to being top performers.

Connect with me on LinkedIn
Watch episodes on our YouTube Channel
Watch THIS episode on our YouTube Channel
Schedule a Discovery Call with me
www.kaizenperformance.com

This week I'm going to talk to you about that person on your team.

And you know the one, they're the one that started off pretty strong, but now they're just kind of an okay performer.  They show up a little bit late.  They stretch timelines on deliverables.  They don't quite tick all the boxes on a process.  They don't follow up with customers as quickly as they should, et cetera.

You know the one, they started off great, they're just, okay.

So what happens when we have individuals like that on the team?

Well, often, we'll let them go to "pursue success elsewhere" if it's bad enough, but often it's not quite bad enough.

They're just...they're okay, they mostly get things done, but just at a frustrating level, they miss certain things.

It just drives you nuts.

But since they're so nice, you know, their reasons, AKA excuses, sometimes we'll accept those and just deal with it because they're so good in so many other areas of the business, but that's a recipe for disaster long-term because the thing is it's bad enough to compensate for one person.

That's why what's happening when you're delegating and they're not doing what needs to get done, and you're picking up the slack or helping them out, pitching in a little bit too much.  Now you're compensating for their weakness, they don't have what it takes.

When that happens, when you start compensating, it's going to take up your time.  It's going to take up your energy, it's going to take up your focus.

And that's just with one person.

Imagine if that multiplies to a few people on your team, especially on your leadership team.

Now you spend your days dealing with BS, firefighting, frustrated, not being able to get at the things that you need to get to in your business, not being able to focus on the important things that you want to do.  

So what do we do about this?

Well, the number one thing is let these people stand up to their own responsibility.  They've committed to fulfilling a role and the role should have outcome based job description, where they know exactly what's expected of them.

It might be time for a reset, to re-communicate your expectations and also re-communicate consequences and also benefits.  Consequences of not fulfilling the role and benefits of fulfilling the role.

But make sure that we get a commitment from these individuals that they will step back up to where they need to be, within a certain timeframe.  And then you've got to measure it.  Make sure that you're holding these people accountable to specific objectives to be delivered on.

If that doesn't happen, you're just going to continue having these individuals that are great, nice enough, but drive you nuts because they take up too much of your time.  You cannot grow a business like that.

So that's it for this week.

Stop owning other people's responsibilities.  Stop compensating for poor performers.  Let them take the self-responsibility to grow, to step into the role and perform like they committed to doing the first place.

If you want to chat on this, if you have one of those crazy team players that's driving you nuts, hit me up for a chat, I'm always happy to help.