Category Leading With Courage

While teaching leadership at Mount Royal University, my class had a great discussion about Servant Leadership and discipline.

Read about the myths of servant leadership

We explored one student’s situation: She has an employee who was good at her job but had a toxic and nasty attitude towards her employer, her co-workers and her work.

Sometimes, angry and negative people appear to do a good job, always at work, always on time. They are careful not to be too critical when supervisors or managers are around but are quick to spread rumours and try to supersede management at their discretion.

As we talked, I suggested that the employee was good at her tasks; but terrible at her job.

Leaders who struggle with effectiveness misconstrue servant leadership as never having to enforce a standard or discipline an employee. 

Servant Leaders maintain standards and team norms to maintain high employee engagement and, in turn, does not allow mediocrity. 

By allowing this miserable person to carry on without consequences creates mediocracy throughout your team.

Can You Fire a Poisonous Employee? 

The short answer is yes.

But this is a time to get help.

You needed to get your boss and HR team involved. There are legal, labour-relations and possible human rights risks to the whole organization by mishandling firing someone. So be careful.

More importantly, the ‘problem’ employee needs to be treated fairly and with respect.

There is a possibility they have never been called out on their behaviour. Maybe, just maybe, with the right coaching, mentoring and good performance management you can help turn this person around.

To be honest, the odds of rescuing the employee are poor, but they may deserve the opportunity to improve their performance.

Step One: What to Say When Sitting Down for a First Meeting

While you may have counselled the employee in passing (“Hey, I noticed you were very negative at that meeting”), this is the time for pointed and directed information.

It is possible that they don’t realize just how negatively they are coming across to co-workers, so ask questions and find out what they are thinking.

Some approaches work better than others, but using the model of Facts, Feelings and Future is useful when having awkward conversations.

Read about the 4 F’s

Try this script:

“I’ve noticed you are unhappy and speak quite negatively about your job and the other people who work here. For instance, I’ve noticed that while you’re always polite face to face, you’ll say negative things behind people’s backs.”

 “Part of your job is building good relationships with co-workers, and your behaviour undermines this. What can I do to help you in this area?

The question at the end will allow your employee to speak up and share their grievances, which, most likely they will have. Here’s the thing: Be compassionate.

 But at the end of all the sympathy and compassionate communication, you need to come to this: “Regardless, the behaviour is inappropriate in this office. We value your work, and we don’t want to lose you, but if you cannot pull this together, we will terminate your employment.”

Document the time, date, and content of the discussion. At this stage, you can present them with an official performance improvement plan document that details what is expected.

Step Two: Implement a Performance Management Plan with the Employee

You want to implement a Performance Management Plan that stresses progressive discipline.

Read about performance agreements and charters

This is where you follow a series of steps, with the idea that if the employee either improves or is terminated.

Step Three: Follow up

You should never expect instant perfection from an employee in the performance improvement process. After all, it takes an effort to change, and it took a long time to get here.

This is precisely the time when you must become a micro-manager. If you notice poor behaviour, correct it at the moment.

Read why micromanagement is a good thing

Regardless schedule a formal meeting every two-weeks during the performance management plan, if they are making significant progress, congratulate them. If they are not making progress, this is where the “progressive” part of progressive discipline kicks in.

Present them with a written warning. This should include details of the problems they need to resolve as well as the information that if their behaviour does not improve, your organization will suspend them and then terminate their employment.

Explain that this warning is being placed in their employee file. Ask them to sign to indicate that they have received this warning. They may object, saying that they disagree with what is written. You can explain that their signature doesn’t mean agreement, but rather that they received it.

Step Three: Termination

If the behaviour does not improve, it’s time to let your negative employee go.

You might be tempted to keep them on, understand that if you do not act, you will have no power over this employee ever again. They will know that they can do whatever they want to, and you won’t do much.

You may also have to provide some amount of severance – Get legal or HR advice. It is galling to pay a  problem employee on their way out the door. But remember the organization failed the person by misfiring or not managing them properly, and a small severance may show good-faith if the employee decides to take legal action.

Final Thoughts

If you say, “But I can’t afford to lose them,” think again.

Negative employees who gossip are damaging to your whole department. Your other employees are more likely to quit and are not as engaged as they would be if they were in a functional department.

The Servant Leader owes it to all employees to take care of this poisonous employee, which means firing them if they either refuse to or are unable or unwiling to change.

Imagine

Imagine going to bed one evening.

You cuddle up with your loved one and sleep peacefully.

You get up, pour a coffee and turn on the news.

A reporter advises you that your team has just grown by a factor of 4; your operating budget ballooned by ten times; and, your team is headline news with the world watching your every move.

When I led a large disaster response organization, this was my nightly reality.

It happened with great regularity, and pulling together a team on a moment’s notice and grow the business to respond to the disaster was exhilarating as any rush you could imagine.

Reality

Most business leaders do not face that level of overnight growth, but what CEO doesn’t dream of dealing with rapid business growth.

The energy and excitement when everything you touch seems to turn to gold are way more appealing than saying no, dealing with falling revenues and laying good people off.

Over the past few years, I have worked with many leaders who have grown their organizations several times in size.

To a person, they are energized by the growth. But they were equally frustrated by the disconnect between strategy and operations; stymied by broken lines of communications; and, falling employee morale.

Whether you are navigating a booming startup or a long-established organization, leading through periods of rapid-growth is hard work.

This article will explore those challenges and offer ideas to help you succeed.

What are the challenges?

1 – Speed – When everything is moving so incredibly fast it seems impossible to pause and think. Rapid-growth creates a vortex that sucks up everyone’s time and energy leaving little time to do anything but survive each activity and get to the next.

Speed becomes a stimulant, with people striving to move faster and faster, but testing the team’s limit to execute.

2 – Shortsightedness – The collective view becomes shortsighted. Everything in the immediate foreground is crystal clear and yet things more than a few days or weeks away seems off far off over the horizon.

Forward thinking and strategic planning are almost impossible in this chronically myopic environment.

3. People Processes – In the high-growth environment, people processes break down. Onboarding is fast and furious. The focus becomes on getting bodies in seats.

Leadership development stops being

individual contributors and left to sink or swim as collective contributors.

Managers end up in over their heads feelings.

Consider These 4 Questions to Mitigate the Challenges of Rapid-Growth:

1 – Who’s eyeing the future? Somebody must be accountable for looking beyond the moment and towards the future.

The CEO or Executive Director is responsible for the long-range view and must hold the senior managers accountable through dialogue and clarity of strategic instructions.

2 – Who’s watching the store? It is essential to have someone focus on the business functions (processes, infrastructure, and quality) because rapid-growth can only be successful unless it built on the organization’s existing foundation.

Somebody must be responsible for fighting inertia, push continuous improvement, eliminating bottlenecks and ensure that the organization’s support functions and future investments are done based on future needs.

3 – Who’s looking after talent? In times of rapid growth, there is a tendency to hire and promote fast and sort issues out later. Trust me when I say there is a very high cost of ignoring hiring, and development processes.

Consider distributing this burden to the all your employees by actively involving them in recruiting and onboarding new team members.

4. Who’s building the culture? To be an effective leader, you must understand the power your values are as the reference point to everyone who works with you. 

If you compromise values for expediency, you send a signal to the organization that they are just so many words. Use them in every aspect of organizational culture: from hiring, firing, resolving problems, serving stakeholders and growing the business.

Final Thoughts

There is nothing more exciting than living through a period of rapid growth.

It is like lashing yourself to a bucking bronco and hanging on for dear life.

For leaders, cool heads must prevail on the issues of strategy, talent, operations, and culture or the trashing can break your organization’s back.

A client asked, “What is the one roadblock I will encounter when improving the culture of leadership in my company?

I responded, “You.”

My client is bright, smart and successful, yet she could not break free to the next level in business.

Quite frankly she was her own trip wire.

My client:

– wanted to know what’s going on with every initiative and project
– tried to be personally acquainted with all the customers
– wanted to master of all the technology of the business
– wanted to feel like the hero, because no one can do what she can do

My client is doomed to a life of Sisyphean tasks with little hope of business growth, financial freedom, or the ability to take some time off.

Read more about Sisyphus and leadership

The more of the leader that is necessary to operate the business on a day to day basis, the smaller the business will remain.

Once we identified that my client was getting in her way of reaching their potential, we agreed that she had two choices.

1. Get comfortable with being the “key” employee and never achieve the kind of time and money freedom she wanted; or,

2. Choose to make a permanent adjustment that will transform their company forever.

Since I have been a part of helping leaders transform their leadership experience, I can reveal the three time-tested steps to get out of your way and achieve success.

Look in the mirror – Explain to yourself and your team that you are the limiting factor of the business. By being a micro-manager, technician, loving status quo, wearing too many departmental hats, always the hero, you have been holding back the success of the business, but now it’s time for a change.

Read More About Being Self Aware

Lead – Leadership is void when you are too busy doing the work of the business, but now you must be strong and decisive. To galvanize this strategic shift how you conduct business create strategic objectives that will provide direction to the team.

Read more about  taking action

Enable – Actively engage your team by changing your language from instructive to intentional. For example, tell your team that you intend to achieve an objective and ask for them to provide the how.

Read more about enabling people

The key in all three of these steps is in realizing that you must take action because no one else in your company will do it for you. For the few, the brave, those who pursue excellence and not status quo, now is the perfect time for a change.

Great leadership always comes from looking down on your business honestly.

What type of leader are you?

It’s tough economic times in my home province of Alberta due to a halving of the price of oil, yet there is a cautious consensus that things are stabilizing and people are starting to hire and grow.

Read more about talking to your people in tough times

As people start to hire, they are surprised to realize that there is as much business risk in growth as there is contraction; but what do leaders need to get the full advantage out of growing?

There is a minimal competitive advantage gained from strategy, technology, finance or marketing. These disciplines are essential as they can set one company apart from another, and knowledge of each has become ubiquitous and democratic. Any size organization has unlimited access to the best thinking and practices around those subjects.

The one remaining untapped, simple, reliable and virtually free competitive advantage is a healthy and robust leadership culture.

A leadership culture can eliminate politics and confusion from the environment, cause productivity and morale to soar and prevent good people from leaving. The most brilliant organization in the world can fail if it does not have a leadership culture – look at Uber.

I’ve seen it repeatedly when a healthy leadership culture will always find a way to succeed because it will tap into every bit of human intelligence it has. I have led volunteers & staff to respond to some of the most significant disasters of our time by unleashing human talent.

Why haven’t more companies embraced and reaped the benefits of a leadership culture? 

Quite frankly, it’s hard. It requires real work and focused discipline. Therefore it has no appeal to those looking for a quick fix.

But the biggest reason is that it requires courage. 

Leaders must be willing to confront themselves, their peers, and the dysfunction within their organization with honesty and persistence. They must be prepared to walk straight into uncomfortable situations and address issues preventing them from realizing their potential.

Read more about leading with courage.

What exactly does an organization have to do to develop a leadership culture? There are three simple but complex steps:

1. Build a Tight Leadership Team – Get the organization’s leaders to behave in a functional, cohesive way. If the people responsible for running an organization act dysfunctional, that dysfunction will cascade into the rest of the organization and success.

2. Create & Communicate Clarity – The second step for building a healthy organization is ensuring that the leadership team members are aligned and clear on the organization’s existence and the highest essential priorities. Leaders must eliminate gaps between them so that people have complete clarity about what they need to do to make the organization successful.

Then over-communicating that clarity. Leaders build a culture of leadership personally and consistently repeat themselves and reinforce what is important. This action sets leaders of healthy organizations apart.

3. Reinforce – Leaders must ensure that any process involving people, from hiring and firing to performance management and decision-making, is designed to support and emphasize the organization’s success intentionally.

Can an organization with a healthy culture of leadership fail? Yes. 

When politics, ambiguity, dysfunction and confusion are reduced, people are freed to serve clients, solve problems and help one another in ways that will leave unhealthy organizations behind as you turn the economic corner. 

Healthy organizations recover from setbacks, attract the best people, repel others, and create opportunities that, at the end of the day, create an environment of success.

If I were to ask you to imagine a heroic commander of a 100,000-man army, what would your mind’s eye see?

Would you picture a 42-year-old, awkwardly tall, pear-shaped, over-weight guy?

Could you imagine someone who was a failed teacher, a failed insurance salesman and a failed real-estate developer?

Well, that was Lieutenant General Arthur Currie.

During WW1, Currie was the Deputy Commander of the Canadian Corp during the Battle of Vimy Ridge and became the Commander of the Canadian Army in Europe. Postwar, with his high school education in hand became the Principle of McGill University.

This isn’t a retelling of a great moment in Canadian history. It is a story of a relative under-achiever who rose to face an unbelievable challenge and the lessons for the rest of us mere mortals.

There is only so much space in history for an Eisenhower, Churchill or Caesar and history is replete with unnamed regular folks like us who work hard and play our parts in achieving greatness.

Here are five characteristics demonstrated by General Currie, and all people, who become great leaders in their own time & right?

Uncompromising Integrity. Do not cut corners or cheat. Though others may be smarter, more forceful, and more creative, never compromised in your work and life.

Read about moral courage

Work Hard. Often when others play or waste time, continue to work. Feel like they are stealing from the company unless you give your best efforts.

Be Personally Responsible. Never blame employers and employees or complain because someone else in the organization was recognized or received a promotion.

Be Decisive. Know that slow decision-making is poor leadership and that analysis paralysis can kill an effort. Instead of living in fear of making the wrong decisions, move forward just as soon as you have sufficient information, not complete information.

Read about making decisions

Read. Good leaders read books, articles, and anything they could to make them a better person and a better leader. Ordinary men and women became extraordinary through constant and continued learning, regardless of the sacrifice.

Like General Currie, most of us are not the smartest, the best educated, or most articulate.

But Like Currie, we can hold high principles & work hard, and through these character traits, we common men and women can become extraordinary leaders.

When someone enrols to take my online education seminars, I ask them a simple question: As A Leader What Is The One Thing That Is Keeping You Awake At Night?

Here is one reader’s question and my answer:

Steve, what keeps me up at night is:

I currently work shift leader for a restaurant. I love the company and what I do. My boss has talked about moving me into management, and he has given me a little constructive criticism, which I appreciated.

He told me that I have skills to become a manager, but that I cannot let other people see my emotions. He says I wear my heart on my sleeve and that allows employees to take advantage and use it against me.

Would you have any advice on how to check my emotions when trying to get my team to perform? How do I keep from wearing my heart on my sleeve?

My response:

What a terrific question!

It is important to be authentic to yourself – including being a boss. There is research that shows employees are more engaged, happier, loyal and productive when they believe their boss is authentic and cares for them.

Assuming your boss has your best interest at heart, I would go back to her/him and ask for factual examples of why they made that comment.

Was it something you did or said that raised concerns? Ask probing open-ended question to get them to be specific about why they think that. Then ask for ways you can improve.

You may want to read my blog on Partnering With Your Boss it walks through how you can assess the relationship you have with a Boss and how you can improve it.

But remember, as you implement their recommendations you need to be authentic and not a mirror image of your boss.

I hope that helps?

I have lots of good stuff in the blog section of my website

Take care