The Retail Rule for Dealing with Consistently Under-Performing Employees
Q, aside from being my fabulous partner in life, is a master at leadership. She is very good a motivating her employees with authentic praise and actionable feedback. She has a genuine interest in seeing to it that people on her teams have every opportunity to advance their careers while being rewarded and recognized for their efforts and contributions. Like me, she also understands the value and importance of experiencing failures and learning from mistakes. Not just for ourselves, but for everyone on our teams.
She also knows how expensive it is to keep mediocre employees around. Consistent improvement is a beautiful thing. Consistently repeating the same mistakes, not so much. It's not just the salary a poor performer is soaking up, they’re blocking a space that could be filled by someone with more ambition or a stronger work ethic. As sure as the sun rises, when an under-performing employee is getting away with playing the system, the other employees quickly become aware of what's happening.
The problem employee's behavior has a corrosive effect on the rest of the team and soon enough the "why bother" attitude takes hold and begins to spread like a virus. It doesn't take much to tip productivity and morale into a free fall. The good people start to leave - the ones with skills that pretty much guarantee they can work wherever they want - while the average, the desperate, and the barnacles stay. The actual cost, in terms of money, of a single consistently under-performing employee is probably closer to 3-4 times their salary in the short term. In the long term...well, maybe there's no upper limit to the cost.
Many years ago, when Q was working for IT in the high-end retail space, she observed several policies for handling merchandise that were reflected in the way many managers also dealt with their employees. For example, If something doesn't sell, for whatever reason, it was common practice to ship the problem merchandise to another store and try to sell it there. I can imagine accounting reasons or sales quotas that drove this practice, but essentially the goal was to make the problem merchandise someone else's problem.
Factory-mindset managers would also do this with employees. They would shift the problem employee to some other department as an easy fix. Moving a problem employee like this is less messy and involves little or no conflict. In systems terms, this is called “shifting the burden.” The very worst managers have a very low tolerance for conflict combined with vanishingly small skills for conflict resolution, let alone personnel development. So "the easy fix" with problem employees is a common strategy, especially in large corporations.
This strategy can appear in many forms. For example, the end-of-shelf-life senior executive or director who is laterally "promoted" to a position that has no direct reports and no real authority. The hope is they eventually retire or leave the organization on their own. Until they do, they're still drawing a salary. In my experience, since giving up status is hard, they'll still insert themselves into other people's business in unhelpful and expensive ways. Another example, the senior developer with stunted social skills who is moved to a legacy project dying a slow death in maintenance mode.
As for merchandise, moving it from store to store like this ends up being very expensive. Better to mark it down in price so that it moves out of the store system altogether. This is counter intuitive to most math-challenged managers with their eye on looking good for the C-suite. That the cost of moving merchandise around like this eventually ends up costing more than the value of the merchandise is easy enough to grasp. But how does the "markdown in place" play out with respect to an employee?
For large corporations, this typically means placing the employee on a performance improvement plan - a PIP. The under-performing employee is given every opportunity to improve. And I mean EVERY opportunity - very clear instructions on what they have to do to show improvement, everything documented to court reporter standards, every benefit of the doubt extended to the employee. The typical HR department will insist on this. After all, they're there to protect the company. They have little interest in how this burdens a manager or their projects. In today's work environment, it becomes the manager's full time job to stay on top of this process. One slip, and everything goes back to zero and the PIP restarts. Some people have played this out FOR YEARS!
"Corporate barnacle" has been my label for the traditional under-performing employee - having secured themselves to the organization with a job, their drive for helping the organization realize its mission consists of doing the barest minimum or nothing at all while drawing a paycheck. The 21st century, however, has brought forth an interesting twist to the traditional under-performing employee - the employee who's drive is dedicated to using the organization's resources to realize personal obsessions while drawing a paycheck. I don't have a label for this new 21st century variety, but there is something decidedly parasitic about such behavior. It's an active rather than passive-aggressive destruction of an organization and the lives of most the other silent employees who recognize and remember the agreement they made when they accepted the offer to work for the organization.
"Think of those who, not by fault of inconsistency but by lack of effort, are too unstable to live as they wish, but only live as they have begun." - Seneca, On Tranquility of Mind, 2.6b
I’m done sorting out what to do with corporate barnacles and of being essentially powerless to shift the composition of a team. Sharing the frustration of co-workers who genuinely seek to do good work according to the agreement they made with the people who sign their paycheck is a slow but deep burn on motivation.
When I think back to the high performing teams I've worked on or with, there are several elements that are common.
We knew and genuinely cared for each other’s well-being. Individual identities were acknowledged, but not evangelized.
We understood what we did at work impacted everyone else on the team and in the organization.
We knew that diversity for the sake of diversity could only lead to fragmentation. That it was equally important to converge on ideas and solutions so that we could move in a concerted direction and solve important problems.
The context, environment, ecosystem, or whatever one cares to call it was sustained by a "start-up attitude." There was no room for slackers or silo seekers. The sense of pulling one's own weight while working to extend beyond our usual workday responsibilities was palpable. No one wanted to appear to be coasting. And with no place to hide, everyone either showed up and did the work or they were gone of their own accord.
Everyone's work was visible to everyone else.
Information was freely - even eagerly - shared.
We had full authority to self-organize.
We were held accountable.
I’m looking to work with people like this again.
Finishing on that note, Project Phoenix is moving right along. It's a few months away from launch, but it now has a home on the web where I'm testing a few ideas: The Stoic Agilist. I expect to bring my experience with building high performing teams back into the world before the end of the year. Not exclusively for existing businesses or software development, however. The plan is to include individuals who seek the benefits that come being part of a high performing team, yet free of the expensive overhead usually provided by a business. The Stoic Agilist will be an avenue by which individuals can reach their own goals and potential with the help of other like-minded people. We shouldn't need the cumbersome structure of a corporation to enjoy the benefits of being part of a high performing Agile team. I plan to change that.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash