The Reason You Keep the Wrong Person on Your Team

Why do we keep the wrong person for months, even years? It’s because you lack clarity and accountability.

Clarity is the part where you examine the standard and the person and force yourself to come to a conclusion. Is the person in the right seat? Are they even on the right bus? It takes time and effort to discern and face the truth. That’s why many leaders won’t push to the point of clarity.

It helps to have a framework to discern this. I have found the following to be helpful. You can ask the following questions when it comes to a trouble spot in your team:

• ENVIRONMENT. Is it an Environmental issue? Are they overworked/understaffed? Not properly equipped? Job description isn’t clear? This includes anything In their work context that’s impacting performance, that’s out of their control.

• DESIGN. Is it a Design issue? Are they in a role that doesn’t fit the way they’re built?

• CHARACTER MATURITY. Is it a character maturity issue? Do they have a problematic posture or way of being? Are they rebellious? Unteachable? Lazy? Quarrelsome? Negative? Disrespectful? Toxic?

We can avoid addressing this for years if we’re not careful; kicking the can down the road.

Accountability is the part where we decide to act in accordance with the evidence instead of allowing the gray area to persist. You confront your standard for the culture and the role, face the fact that the person isn’t the right fit, and take action. Here are the different action paths.

• ENVIRONMENT. If this is the root, take responsibility and fix the environment. This is your responsibility as a leader, not theirs.

• DESIGN. If this is the root, the answer is to remove or relocate. Do they need to be in a different seat, or do they need to leave the bus? Either way, you get to take responsibility as a leader for putting them in a role that wasn’t the right fit for their make up.

• CHARACTER MATURITY. If this is the root of the issue, then you need to decide if you want to train or terminate. This is the category that’s most destructive to culture. If you allow people with negative patterns to remain, they become the standard. You might say the standard is kindness and teamwork, but if you allow a person who is mean and divisive to stay that way, then your actions are inconsistent with your words, and everyone knows it.

Your actions reveal your real standards.

If I have a standard of excellence, and I allow a person who is unable to meet the standard to stay in the role, it erodes culture of my team.

It erodes culture because everyone knows that that standard isn’t real. If it were real, the words of the standard would lead to action.

This is the principle of self-consistency.

Self-consistency comes from accountability.

As a leader, consistency comes very hard for me. Multiple times in my career, I have left situations alone for years that should have been addressed.

Now, my biggest weapon against inconsistency is accountability. I meet with my coach, Nate, every two weeks. He’s been walking with me for over 7 years. He knows my strengths and my weaknesses. He has helped me develop a clear standard for my culture, called the Sandbox.

All he does every two weeks is hold me accountable to the standard. When I’m wrestling with an issue, he brings up the standard. We determine the course of action that is aligned with the standard. I leave every meeting with action items that are aligned with the standard. And I always know: in two weeks, he’s going to ask me if I took the action that was in line with the standard. If not, we’re going to explore the reason why.

There’s nothing punitive about this, because he occupies the space I’ve given him in my life, and he occupies it in love.

Having accountability has elevated my leadership more than anything else. It’s simply having someone in my life who is watching my choices and helping to ensure those choices are happening in accordance with the standard that I say I believe.

Over time, we will tend to wander away from our standards. We tend to take the path of least resistance. Especially if we don’t have checkpoints to reveal this. This is entropy in action.

As Antonio Banderas said in the movie Desperado:

“You know, it’s easier to pull the trigger than play guitar. Easier to destroy than to create.”

It doesn’t take effort to lose ground or to wander astray. It takes an amazing amount of effort to keep growing, keep the standard, and to be intentional.

As leaders, because it’s so hard, we can become victims of entropy. We stop growing. We stop fighting the hard battles. We settle for mediocrity instead of pursuing excellence. We don’t address the people and circumstances that are eroding our culture.

In so doing, we’re paying a premium when it comes to potential.

We are losing money. We are impacting the health and joy of our workers. We are increasing turnover. We are compromising effectiveness.

It’s easy to gloss over this. Especially if the problems are subtle; because the problems develop over time. If I am the leader, and I have individuals, teams, or departments that are underperforming, disengaged, or uninspired, that’s on me. That’s my responsibility. It takes an extraordinary amount of character maturity to own this. That’s why great leaders are rare.

Great leaders are willing to own failure, except responsibility, and take action.

What is the point of being a leader? Is it not to facilitate thriving? If your people are ridiculously happy, engaged, and effective, will that not lead to significant benefits, including amazing profitability?

When we’ve been in a non-ideal or even toxic situation for years, we stop believing that thriving is possible.

It’s always possible. If you’ve been sitting in toxicity for a long time, it’s hard.

I’m not going to say it’s easy.

But you probably already know what you need to do.

The next step is to face the evidence that you’ve been ignoring. Get accountability. Rededicate yourself to excellence and thriving. Remember why you became a leader in the first place.

I hope this framework of Clarity and Accountability, along with the diagnosing tool of Environment, Design, and Character Maturity will help you put accurate words to your situation so you can begin to make progress.

Leadership doesn’t change because we read another article. It changes when someone helps us see what we’ve been avoiding.

If you’d like an outside perspective on your team, your culture, or a difficult leadership decision, reach out. I offer coaching for executives, managers, and leadership teams who want to build healthier, more effective organizations. Shoot me an email at johnny [at] superpowerquest.com