4
MANAGE THE ROSTER
The most important question is Who? . . . Not what is your next career step, but who are the people in your unit that you are going to take care of as a leader? Take care of your people, not your career. . . . I [found I] didn’t have to have the answers to the whats if I really paid attention to finding great whos.
—JIM COLLINS
New York Times bestselling author of Good to Great
(Episode #216, The Learning Leader Show)
THE POWER OF WHO
The most important decisions you make as a manager (whether new or experienced) are those about the makeup of your team. Surrounding yourself with excellent people will be the single greatest determining factor in your success or failure as a leader. Jim Collins, author of one of the best business books of all time, Good to Great, put it succinctly when we spoke: “What comes second. It’s always who first.”1 My dad told me early in my career that “hiring, training, and developing the right people will make you rich and famous within your industry. Hiring the wrong people will make you dumb, poor, and unemployed.” Harsh though it sounds, I’ve learned that it’s true. Building your team well requires accurately analyzing what you have, correctly identifying what you need, and developing a deep understanding of what you’re looking for beyond the simple skills needed to do the task.
A great example of keenly knowing what you’re looking for when building a team comes from the days of NASA’s greatest adventure: the Apollo Program’s missions to the moon. Gene Kranz, flight director at Mission Control in Houston for the historic Apollo 11 landing and for the heroic Apollo 13 recovery, described the Apollo team as “a team that would not fail.” Members of the group were carefully chosen according to their optimism. “Optimism is a collective construction, a view of the world based on a complex blend of what is and what ought to be.”2 The Apollo team studied people under duress. They studied their ability to communicate with others. They studied how they responded in times of acute adversity. If trainees didn’t handle difficulty well, they were quickly weeded out. By the end of the training, Kranz said, “The team has come together, we’ve developed the ability to compensate for each other when the chips get down and we have an attitude so positive that given a few seconds we can solve any problem.”3 And on April 13, 1970, when the Apollo 13 spacecraft suffered a catastrophic, mission-aborting explosion in its cryogenic oxygen tanks, that “collective optimism” built into the team was what enabled Mission Control in Houston and the crew stranded aboard the crippled spacecraft to solve a series of almost unsolvable problems. Four days later, astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert splashed down safe and sound in the Pacific Ocean. Gene Kranz and the rest of the “collectively optimistic” team in Houston had guided them home to Earth against all odds. Those odds would not have been overcome if NASA had simply hired engineers based on their ability to do the math.
Even if you’re not in the business of solving problems with people’s lives at stake, it’s still imperative to focus a great deal of energy on the who of your team. We’ve seen countless leaders who make poor hires. Rarely do they remain in those leadership roles for long. And those who do it well? They have the greatest odds of sustaining excellence over an extended period of time. Bringing onto the team a great new employee who is highly motivated and has the skills for the job can bring you great peace of mind and literally help you sleep better at night. Alternatively, adding a bad employee to the mix (or allowing one to remain on the team) can make your job more difficult, keep you up at night, and literally cost your company money. There is nothing we can do as leaders that is more important than taking the time and effort to hire well.
Warren Buffett is often asked for advice by business students. One of the questions he routinely fields is what he looks for in someone to work with. In response, Warren lists three qualities: “Intelligence, energy, and integrity. And if they don’t have the last one, don’t even bother with the first two. I tell them, ‘Everyone here has the intelligence and energy—you wouldn’t be here otherwise. But the integrity is up to you. You weren’t born with it, you can’t learn it in school. . . . You decide to be dishonest, stingy, uncharitable, egotistical, all the things people don’t like in other people. . . . They are all choices. Some people think there’s a limited little pot of admiration to go around, and anything the other guy takes out of the pot, there’s less left for you. But it’s just the opposite.”4
General Stanley McChrystal echoes Buffett’s sentiment:
Sometimes you’re successful just because you’re lucky. And sometimes you’re a failure just because you’re unlucky. And, so, your relative wealth or promotions or any kinds of things aren’t always directly related to either how hard you worked or how good you were. And yet, your character is something you can control. You can decide whether you’re honest. You can decide whether you’re loyal. You can decide how you think about duty. You can decide about all the things that really matter, and they can’t be taken away from you. People like James Stockdale and John McCain taught us that, even in horrific situations like the Hanoi Hilton, if you can hold onto your character, you can hold onto that essence which is you, and nobody can take it from you.5
General McChrystal extended a gracious invitation for me to tour the hallowed grounds at the Battle of Gettysburg alongside the students he teaches in his leadership class at Yale. We learned a lot about the history of the battle over the course of two days with General McChrystal and some of his friends as tour guides. However, one teaching point that I specifically remembered was this, “The real lesson is . . . it’s not tactics, not strategy; it’s always about the people.”
MANAGING THE TEAM YOU INHERIT
For nearly every management role you will ever earn, there will already be a team in place awaiting you. Unless you are in the position of building a brand-new expansion team, you will not have the luxury (and patience from above) of building a completely handpicked team. Chances are, the team you will be taking over will be a combination of high performers, low performers, and average performers. Knowing how to tell the difference requires more than simply looking at a spreadsheet.
You need a framework in place to assess the current team, their values, their performance, their motivation level, and the other critical qualities that will be key to the culture you want to build. It’s also helpful to know why there was an opening in the first place. Did the previous manager get fired for performance? Did she get promoted for doing a fantastic job? Knowing why the job was available will help you more accurately assess the situation.
In his book The First 90 Days, author Michael Watkins writes about the challenges facing a manager taking over an existing team. When I interviewed Watkins, he discussed some of the biggest mistakes first-time managers make when they inherit a team. The biggest one is when new managers, eager to put their stamp on the team’s makeup, do not properly balance stability and change. “Building a team you’ve inherited is like repairing an airplane in mid-flight. You will not reach your destination if you ignore the necessary repairs, but you do not want to try and change too much too fast and crash the plane. The key is to find the right balance between stability and change.”6
As you assess the character and skills of your new team, you will (hopefully) find members who are obvious keepers. These are the people who exhibit all the characteristics you look for in a person and who perform at a high level. They exhibit intellectual curiosity, work ethic, coachability, energy, and integrity. They are group influencers and team leaders. As the new manager, it is critical that you make sure they “feel the love.” By that I mean that you quickly signal to them that you see and understand the value they bring to the table and how important that value is to the team’s success. Give them ownership in the team. Meet with them one-on-one. Ask them for ideas. Request their help. You may have been a high-performing individual contributor at one point in your career. Think about a time when you got a new boss. How did they handle the situation with you? Did they include you and make you feel valued as a leader of the team? If that wasn’t your experience, remember how it felt and work to avoid creating that feeling in your new team’s A-players.
Losing the team leaders’ buy-in from the beginning could crater any chance you have of building a long-lasting, excellent team. Others on the team will follow their lead. Failing here will not likely cause the great performers to quit immediately. It is more likely they will begin looking for another job and putting in only enough time, energy, and focus to keep their current job, but nothing more. That is a recipe for the slow and steady death of a team, and it is an error that is perfectly avoidable.
HIRING: WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?
In order to build the right team, first, it is necessary to understand what you value in a person. The specificity of the role you must fill is obviously an important part of the equation. But, too often, hiring managers focus on those spec requirements as if they are the most important parts of the hiring decision. What’s worse, sometimes those requirements are treated as if they are the only things that matter. Taking this approach is a huge mistake, and results in a great hire only by sheer luck. Far more important than the tangible skills you can find in multiple candidates or deliver through effective training is the makeup of the person who will be a complete asset to your team.
To get this right, you must be intentional. Here is a useful exercise I recommend to the leaders I advise: Sit down with your personal board of advisers—that group of trusted mentors we discussed in Chapter 1—and create your list of “must-have” or “nonnegotiable” qualities. Avoid the temptation to enumerate generically desirable virtues. For this to be an effective guide for your hiring process, you need to tease out why each of these qualities is important to you and your business. Here is my list of the values I look for when adding someone to my team, in no particular order:
Work ethic. A willingness and track record of working hard to achieve excellence (common in athletes, military veterans, immigrants, and people who’ve had to financially support themselves from a young age, like working two jobs during college to pay their own way).
Resilience. Ability to fight through tough moments in their lives during which they’ve been knocked down but they’ve gotten back up.
Humility. Willing to ask for help. They don’t think they have it all figured out. They constantly seek to be in rooms with people who are smarter than they are.
Curious. Seeking not just information to expand their knowledge base, but wisdom to understand it. They want to know why and have mentors they regularly meet with.
Self-aware. Knowledge of self and a willingness to take a hard look and honestly grade their skill level at particular tasks. They put measures in place to better understand themselves (mentors, assessments, dedicated time in their schedule to think, write, reflect, learn, grow).
Optimistic. They believe, If I consistently show up and work hard, good things will happen. Their outlook is characterized by pronoia, which is the belief that the world is conspiring to work for them (or the opposite of paranoia, the belief that the world is conspiring to work against you).
Energy. A zest for life. They lift up the energy of any room they enter. This does not mean that they are overly outgoing or even that they are extroverts. Rather, they have a magnetic quality about them.
Coachable. This is why I’ve hired so many former athletes and military veterans. They are quite accustomed to being coached, especially in a critical manner from these experiences.
Effective speaker/writer. Most jobs require a healthy dose of written and spoken forms of communication, so why not hire for it?
Dedication to a task. Have they exhibited a track record of persisting long enough to make something good happen?
Thoughtful. They take time to think, reflect, and analyze their actions and those of others.
Intentional. They make choices on purpose. They don’t live a haphazard life and say, “Oh well.” They are still open to spontaneity, but they make it happen and have reasons for what they do. They are people of action.
Confident. Self-belief that is the product of actual accomplishment in multiple life categories. They believe that they can apply their operating framework to any situation, implement it, tweak it, and they will be a productive achiever. This is not to be confused with empty bravado and arrogance.
You’ll notice, the list isn’t a short one. We human beings are complex, multifaceted creatures, and there are more factors to consider than a few generic qualities. On the other hand, this isn’t a list against which I grade people to see how many boxes they check, with a predetermined number required to be considered. When I set out to hire a new team member, I am looking neither for bare adequacy nor for perfection. It is in between those two extremes that valuable compatibility lies, and that’s my target.
Tech entrepreneur and investor Keith Rabois (a member of the “PayPal Mafia” along with Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Elon Musk) is widely known for his early stage investments and executive roles at PayPal, LinkedIn, and Square. He invested in Yelp and Xoom prior to each company’s IPOs and is on their boards of directors. He shared his thoughts on how to make a good leadership hire, which I find instructive given his experience:
Assess whether they think like an owner. Do they own mistakes? Are they kept up at night by what they would do differently if they were CEO?
Are they capable of strategic thinking? Can they keep your entire business equation in their head and even come up with new levers you hadn’t thought of that can move certain variables?
Do their strengths align with the major risks of the company? Do they diversify your leadership team’s style and background?
Are they a magnet for talent? Can they bring on people even better than themselves?7
I share this with new leaders who are looking for direction on the optimal way to behave. What do the most effective leadership minds in business look for in a leader? Why do they look for these qualities? As Kobe Bryant once said, “There is power in understanding the journey of others to help create your own.”8
Bridging the Gender Gap
In their book It’s the Manager, Gallup’s Jim Clifton (CEO) and Jim Harter (chief scientist of workplace management and well-being) highlight a Gallup study showing that gender-balanced business units—those that are closer to a 50/50 female-to-male split—perform substantially better financially than those that are lopsided in the gender makeup of the team. Combine gender balance with a high engagement culture, and the benefits are magnified. According to Clifton and Harter, there are a few reasons why gender balance improves business outcomes:
Gender-balanced work groups have a greater capability to get work done and to meet customers’ needs.
On average, women are more engaged than men.
Female managers tend to have more engaged employees than male managers.9
There’s no other way to say it: if you want to succeed, be intentional about building a diverse, gender-balanced team.
Is Your Team Worthy?
How is your organization viewed in the marketplace? What is the culture? How well do people know about you and what you value? What is your specific team known for within the organization itself? What is your team’s brand? The most effective leaders are thinking about this and are intentional about creating a team and an environment where people want to be. Everyone on your team is a member of your team’s marketing department. Everyone is a recruiter, constantly on the lookout for great people to join your team. As Charlie Munger said, “How can you get a great wife? Deserve one.” Are your actions those of someone who deserves a high-quality person to work on your team?
How Do You Find It?
After defining what you value in a teammate, now comes the hard part: figuring out how to accurately assess if the candidates you are interviewing possess those skills. Simply asking straightforward questions like “Do you have humility?” is not likely to yield any real insights. Those are the kinds of questions that typically generate the answers the candidate believes you want to hear. When it comes to the art of conversational interviewing, here are a few things to consider:
1. The interview is when candidates are on their very best behavior. If they’re late for their interview, that is a big red flag that speaks volumes about their punctuality and what you should expect from them as a member of your team. If they can’t show up to the interview on time, get ready for more of that behavior once they are comfortable and actually have the job.
2. Get them out of interview mode. Take the candidate to lunch or dinner. Walk around the office and speak casually. When you are working with a limited amount of time in an interview, it’s on you as the interviewer to figure out how to be creative in order to get to know the real person behind the candidate. I’ve been on both sides of this. When I was considering a new job, I wanted to meet my (potential) new boss outside of the office to see what he or she was like as a person. I paid attention to how they spoke about other people (speaking poorly behind others’ backs is a massive indicator for a bad boss), how curious they were, how much they truly listened to me, how often they looked at their phone, etc. In other words, how do they behave when they are more relaxed, and their guard isn’t up because they’re not sitting in “an interview”? You want to get to know the people you’re surrounding yourself with on a real level, and not just as a “boss” or as an “employee” on your team.
3. Dig deep. Most candidates prepare for the basic interview questions. The best interviewers focus on the follow-up questions. If you ask a candidate to describe a time when he overcame adversity in his life (which we’ve identified is an important quality for this role), don’t just listen to the prepared story and move on. Instead, keep going further. Ask, “Why? What happened next? And then what? And then what happened after that? And what did you learn from that?” I’ve learned a lot about interviewing, both from the scores of job interviews I conducted as a hiring manager and from the over 300 guests I’ve interviewed for my podcast. In either case, without question, the really good stuff comes from the second or third follow-up questions. Rare is the occasion when the first question alone does the trick.
What Do You Ask?
It’s critical that your questions in the interview align with the values you are trying to identify in a person. Each question should be asked with that specific purpose in mind. Based on what I value, here are some of the questions I have asked candidates I have interviewed:
Resilience. “Share a story about a time you failed/lost/struggled and how you responded in that moment.” Once they tell you their story (and most candidates are very ready for this question), it is now on you to keep pushing. Ask “Why? What happened next? How did that impact you? What do you do now differently because of that?” Keep going, because what you are looking for isn’t simply a story that answers your question; what you’re really after is whether candidates truly have internalized the learnings from the experience they are describing into their personal operating system.
Curious. “What fascinates you right now? What are you studying? What’s something you learned recently that really excited you? What books do you read? What are you interested in outside of work?” I want to see if they have a true intellectual curiosity. By that, I mean that they have a desire to aggressively seek to know more and to understand better. This quality is important because all roles are constantly changing, and if they are able to approach each change with curiosity, then their ability to learn, evolve, and grow increases.
Coachable. I ask them to share a story about feedback. Former athletes and members of the military tend to thrive in this area, but sports or the military aren’t the only contexts in which people are coached. “Can you share a time when you’ve benefited from a coach/mentor/boss and how? How do you actively seek out feedback outside of your job and boss?” I want someone who craves feedback with the purpose of getting better. Do they proactively seek it out? That is my hope.
Effective speaker/writer. Often, I ask for writing samples. “Can you share proposals you’ve put together in the past? Do you have blog posts that you’ve published? Or a video of you giving a presentation?” At times I’ve given the candidate a pre-interview assignment in which writing and speaking are part of the homework. I want to see them do the work. Being an effective communicator is a critical skill for success in most roles today. We are on email constantly, we give status updates in meetings, we need to be able to tell our story and the story of our team. It’s a huge plus to have people who can do this effectively.
Optimism/energy. This is something you can immediately begin measuring from the instant you speak on the phone, from when they walk in the door and how they greet the receptionist at the front desk. (I highly recommend regularly checking with the receptionist for information about job candidates. You can tell a lot about a person from how they treat people that they think they don’t need to impress.) I want to work with people who believe things will go well and who bring energy into the building and into the team. Nobody wants to be around “energy vampires,” as author Jon Gordon would call them.10 We want people who bring a spark to the room. This is a quality you sense when you spend time with them. It’s also worth asking their references and reviewing their social media channels for this behavior as well.
Do Your Homework
I’m amazed when I speak with hiring managers who don’t check references at all or only one or two. When making a decision for who you’re bringing on your team, it’s worth the time to speak with as many people who know the candidate as you can. And not just the people they list as references. Use LinkedIn to see who they are connected to that they may have worked with in a past role. Reach out to those people to learn more.
Recently I sat down with Brian Koppelman to discuss how he puts together the team to create and shoot Showtime’s hit TV show Billions. Prior to us recording, he gave me a tour of the office. As we looked in on the various “writers’ rooms,” I quickly noticed that it was a very collaborative environment. Not an open office space (we’ve read plenty about how ineffective those are), but an office with many rooms of people working together in small groups. When I asked Brian how he chooses the 150 people to work on the TV show, he said this, “First, we have a no asshole rule. If you’re not kind, nice, and able to work with others, we don’t care how talented you are, you will not be part of what we do. Then, since we need so many people, we really focus on the few key leader hires. We have to get those hires right. Because they are in charge of hiring the rest of the team. We trust those people to make great hiring decisions to fill out the rest of the group.” As the cocreator and showrunner of the show, Brian doesn’t have the time and/or mental capacity to hire everyone. I asked more about those key leadership hires. He said they have a number of meetings with them. Formal interviews, informal dinners, and, “Oh man, we do a ton of reference checks. Calling all the people they’ve worked with to be sure we’re getting it right.”
Search for your serious candidates on all relevant social media platforms. Look at their Twitter feed. What have they tweeted over the past couple of years? Are they speaking in a manner you would be proud to have on your team? Because when you hire that person, they now represent your team. The same is true for all social media posts. This may not have been a practice in the past, but it surely is now. The person is a representation of your team and your company. Their past performance and behavior is a great indicator of their future performance and behavior. The same goes for what they post on social media platforms.
FIRING: WHEN PRUNING IS REQUIRED
Having a garden full of gorgeous rose bushes requires more than just planting, feeding, watering, and enjoying the growth that follows. Healthy growth requires pruning from time to time. It takes a disciplined focus on the long-term health of the rose bush to take a pair of gardening shears to a growing plant. While it is painful in the moment, such actions are necessary for the bush to achieve optimal health and its full blooming potential. The same is true for the team you lead. Unfortunately, the act of firing someone and removing them from your team is sometimes a necessary part of the job. There will be times when the only path to sustaining excellence is telling someone that they will no longer be part of your team.
This is truly one of the most difficult tasks for any new manager. When it starts to become clear that a change needs to be made, you can find yourself feeling torn between conflicting emotions: wanting to be liked and be viewed as a friend by the employee while being respected by the rest of the team; wanting to not be like the harsh boss you may have worked for in the past while still maintaining the expectations and standards of the team culture you’ve worked so hard to build.
This is, without a doubt, one of my least favorite aspects of managing a team. But manage a team for any length of time, and you will have to do it, so it is necessary to understand how to do it well. Here are some tips on how to effectively make a change.
It Shouldn’t Be a Surprise
Being terminated for unacceptable job performance should never come as a surprise. If your employee is performing so poorly that ending their time on your team is required, and they are truly shocked to hear this, then you have failed that employee as a coach and leader. The first time an employee hears in person from you that her work is not meeting the standards expected of her cannot be during the meeting in which she is being let go over it. Such a scenario is grossly unfair to the employee involved, and despite being obviously so, it happens with alarming regularity. There are also legal implications at stake. Wrongful termination suits can be brought against a company for any hint of impropriety. Document and be clear with the employee from the instant things start going south.
Most people do not enjoy giving critical feedback to another person. It is almost impossible to do so without worrying about harming the relationship. The solution for too many managers is not to do it at all. Even worse, however, is when the manager tells the employee that he is not meeting expectations, but uses language that is so softened to avoid causing discomfort that it comes across as too general to do any good. Hearing from your boss that “your work isn’t good enough and needs to improve” is certainly an alert that something is wrong, but it doesn’t give you any specific direction on what needs to improve and how. This is the worst possible outcome because the manager thinks he has given clear feedback to a struggling employee, so from that point on, failure to improve is deemed to be proof of the employee’s lack of will or skill to get with the program.
The better way to deal with this is to be transparent with every person on your team—up-front from day one—that it is your job to be a coach. Coaches do not just give positive feedback. Great coaches give a full perspective of what they see and experience when working with each person as an individual, as well as the team as a whole. Along with this stated intention must come the promise that the feedback will be balanced, will be delivered from a good place (“I care for you and want you to be as great as you can be”), and that it will always be part of an ongoing conversation between you and the employee, rather than it just being their boss dumping bad information on them. If you’ve got the right people on your team, they will have greater respect for someone willing to give balanced feedback than the “cheerleader” manager who offers empty praise without regard to performance. People do not like uncertainty. They want to know where they stand. Tell them. Make sure everyone knows where they stand at all times.
By the time it is necessary to fire an employee, you should already have put in place some sort of a performance plan that outlines specifically what is wrong and—even more important—the specific steps and measurable progress the employee must show in order to improve. Ideally, this should be a written document that you, the employee, and someone from your HR department should sign, as dictated by your company policies. Your struggling employee should be getting individualized attention from you on a regular basis to measure the person’s performance versus that plan. The goal isn’t to be an oppressive burden on them, but to show them you are personally investing your time and energy into helping them improve. Firing someone is a huge responsibility, and should never be done with relish or zeal. It should be your last resort, only after all other avenues have been exhausted.
Involve Your Trusted Partners
Don’t do this alone. Talk regularly with close mentors. Meet weekly with your human resources partner. Make sure that you are not missing any possible detail, either in the legal and policy requirements governing the termination of an employee, but also the good faith effort to help a struggling employee avoid this fate. This is a heavy burden to bear. As much as your company’s policies will allow, don’t try to bear it alone.
Write a Script
Stumbling on your words during a termination meeting can lead to bad consequences. It is not uncommon for employees to file wrongful termination lawsuits based on managers saying something they shouldn’t have during the final meeting. Write your script, and share it with human resources, as well as your mentors. Once it’s been deemed correct, stick to it. While I’m always an advocate of being human, real, and vulnerable, a termination meeting is one in which you should be mindful of your emotions.
Here are two things that you shouldn’t say during this meeting, no matter how tempted you are to do so:
“I completely understand how you feel.” You shouldn’t say this because it simply isn’t true. You do not know how they feel, so don’t claim that you do. Even if you’ve been fired before, this is not the meeting to try to find common ground.
“I know this seems bad right now, but it will be for the best in the long run and you’ll end up thanking me.” No, this moment is not the time to tell someone to look for the silver lining. Getting fired typically generates feelings of embarrassment, sadness, fear, and anger. That is normal. Ignore the impulse to try to steer the person toward other feelings and a different perspective. News like this takes time to process. The best way to help is to allow them that time. Instead of trying to rush them through the emotional process, help them make as quick and as gracious an exit from the building as possible so that they can begin processing what it means for them on their own terms. It may in fact end up being what’s best for them in the long run, but right now is not the long run. It’s right now, and it hurts.
Here’s How to Do It
Be direct, to the point, and share the news as quickly as possible. “The purpose of our time together today is for me to share with you that you will no longer be part of this team. And this is why . . .” When possible, share the exact reason why. If someone cheated, stole, or acted unethically, then tell them. If they were on a performance plan and were not achieving what was laid out in that plan, then this meeting should not be a surprise.
Involve the necessary players in the meeting. At a minimum, you should have a human resources partner present to act as a guide if you start to go off track as well as a witness to how the meeting was conducted. At times, you may even need to have a member of your company’s security team present if you think the news could lead to a hostile response. I’ve had to do that before.
Once you have delivered the news and human resources has said their part, end the meeting and escort the person out of the building. There is no need to extend the meeting any longer than is necessary. If they have personal items at their desk, let them know you will box everything up and mail it to them. While this may sound harsh and even a bit melodramatic, taking this step protects you from an upset (now former) employee causing a scene due to high emotions and no longer feeling like there’s anything to lose by expressing these publicly. That is not good for anyone involved. The employee who was just fired will most likely regret it, and the rest of the employees should be spared the distraction (at best) and the fear of being unsafe (at worst).
I learned this lesson the hard way. I once waited to fire someone who was not meeting the objectives of her performance plan. She was a single mom who was supporting herself and her kids solely on the money she made from this job. I kept putting off the decision because I knew I would be depriving her of that. I waited, and I shouldn’t have. The termination meeting was awful, and she was confused. “Ryan, based on the performance plan, I should have been let go months ago. Since you didn’t do it then, I assumed you never would.” That was my fault. Through my extended inaction, I had inadvertently communicated to her that the expectations and rules had changed and that she had improved sufficiently to avoid losing her job. Hearing that this wasn’t the case left her confused and hurt.
Additionally, my team lost respect for me and my leadership in that moment. My delay in making a change showed them that I would blanch in the face of a tough but necessary decision. They felt I let my emotions win the day, at the expense of the entire team. By avoiding this unpleasant duty of my job as a manager, I had sidestepped emotional discomfort while simultaneously putting the extra burden on them to make up for the underperforming person whom I was allowing to remain on the team. In the end, it’s in the best interest of both the person and the team as a whole to hold people accountable to what you set forth in the plan that was designed for their improvement. Fail to do that, and the team notices that you are not a leader who holds people accountable, undermining the hoped-for culture of excellence moving forward.
Likewise, the underperforming individual also loses respect for you, even though you are letting him or her slide. You are showing yourself to not be a person of your word. Hard as it is to do, the best course of action is the consistent one. Make a plan, execute it, and hold people accountable. If they don’t take advantage of the time and effort you are willing to put into helping them improve, then it’s time for them to move on.
THE GREAT PERFORMER PARADOX
Building and leading a team of high-performing employees is a ticket to success for you as a leader. However, if you’ve managed a team of any size in any field for any length of time, you know how steep a climb that challenge is. With an understanding of what you’re looking for and a disciplined, self-checking approach to how to go about doing it, you can get fairly proficient at finding good people. Even so, truly great performers are a rarity. Even one or two will take your team’s performance to heights you will be unlikely to replicate without them, but finding them is hard. Be fortunate enough to do so, and this new level of success will bring with it a new management quandary: how to retain truly great employees, and—here’s the paradox—whether you should fight to do so.
When a manager has hit the jackpot of finding great employees and has done the work of coaching them to truly great performance, losing such a person means having to start all over again. In the world of sales in which I managed, having a team member who, month in and month out, could be trusted to consistently overperform gave me the breathing room to devote more effort and give more time to other members who were still trying to figure things out. Take away that high performer’s monthly work, and it wasn’t just me as the manager who had to work harder. Everyone did.
But just as you wanted to progress in your career by growing into roles with more responsibilities and better financial rewards (whether within or outside of your company), the highest performing people on your team will want to do the same. The temptation for managers to discourage great employees from seeking greener pastures elsewhere is understandable. At times, this impulse serves to deliver wise counsel, as not every opportunity that appears better truly represents the next best step for your employee. When managers voice opposition to a high performer wanting to leave for a new opportunity, their resistance is couched in language reflective of the best interest of the employee or the team. But, all too often, the real issue is the leaders’ concerns about their own continued success.
When I asked leadership guru Simon Sinek the question, “Why lead?”—why sign up for the extra burden and responsibility of leadership—his single-sentence answer struck me with the clarity of the purest musical note: “If you care to see others succeed, that’s why you lead.”11 Few guests I’ve spoken with have ever said something I agreed with more wholeheartedly, and this issue gets to the heart of why. I believe in its proper form, the act of raising your hand to accept the responsibility (and benefits) of leadership is to volunteer to care more about the success of those you lead than you do your own success. Just like good parenting means preparing children to outgrow their role and leave the nest to go do bigger and better things, a leader knows that it is our job to lose our best-performing employees at some point.
Paradoxically, sometimes the best way to retain your top talent is to help them leave you. Instead of finding ways to convince or even prohibit top performers from leaving, try a different approach: help them. If you focus on helping others achieve what they want, you’ll find that it will help you get what you want. When others in the organization see that you’ve created a place where people go to improve, get better, and ultimately get promoted, your odds of finding the next great performer will increase because those types of people will want to join your team.
As a leader, I really prided myself on helping the people I led do two things:
1. Achieve award-winning levels of performance. Being recognized in front of your peers is a gratifying experience for most. As a sales professional myself, I had experienced the thrill of winning our company’s Circle of Excellence award a few times, and it was an extremely motivating event for me. I vividly remember being called on stage to celebrate a year of very hard work and hugging my colleagues in sheer joy. Along with the public honor came the gift of an all-expenses-paid trip to an exotic destination, which brought with it more opportunities for me to spend time with the leadership team of the company in a more relaxed setting. Being on that trip showed those executives that I was one of the highest performers in the company, which started building momentum for me to get leadership opportunities in the future. There are a lot of bonuses to individual performance success, and I relished the opportunity as a manager to help my team members earn those experiences and bonuses for themselves.
2. Earn a promotion to the role that they wanted. During my individualized, one-on-one meetings with each team member, we would regularly discuss their career goals and identify potential next steps for them to pursue. I talked about this with James Kerr, author of the book Legacy. James embedded himself with the winningest sports franchise of all time, the New Zealand All Blacks. His goal? To learn what excellence looks like from within and show how others could model their organizations after the All Blacks. “Rather than telling someone what to do, ask them what we should do together,” James told me.12 “People will rise to a challenge if it is their challenge.”
During these one-on-one meetings with each individual on my team, my job was to be a great listener and understand the challenge that the person in front of me wanted to tackle. Once I confirmed that I properly understood what they wanted to do and why, then we would work together to map out a path to get there. Along the journey to their goal, that employee would inevitably raise their performance and grow as a leader on the team, benefiting everyone in the process.
A great example of how that worked is Brent Scherz, who was one of my early ambitious sales reps and is now global vice president of inside sales for a multibillion-dollar international company. I had first mentored Brent when we were both individual contributors. Once I got promoted to management, I became his boss. Brent’s desire was to earn a promotion to lead his own team. To get there, we started by laying out a plan to simply “get him in the room” for an interview. To do that, it was imperative that he perform at a high level in his current role. The next year, Brent finished as the number one sales rep, winning the use of a company-provided Porsche for a year as a bonus. This recognition put him in a position to be interviewed.
Next, he had to be prepared for the job he ultimately wanted. Beyond just helping Brent secure an interview, I began including him in coaching moments for the job of being a manager. For example, I would often do “mock calls” with members of my team, in which they would call me (acting as the customer) and go through their entire sales process, working toward a close (getting a deal signed). Afterward, I would bring them into my office, and we would break down what they said and did line by line on my whiteboard. During exercises like this, I would have Brent (or others I was helping to get promoted) sit in my office with me. Then he would lead the feedback session with the teammate. Sometimes this led to some uncomfortable moments, as hearing a peer deliver constructive feedback as if he were the manager can be awkward for all involved. But that’s why I would do it. As a manager, I knew Brent would have to be able to do this, and there’s no better way to prepare for it than to actually do it. Afterward, I would “coach the coach”—Brent then got to hear my feedback on how he performed as a coach to his teammates.
This experience helped him get the feel of what it was like to manage a team. As leaders, we must work to simulate the actual experiences of the roles our best employees aspire to as much as possible. This serves multiple purposes. First, it stretches a top employee and gives her responsibility above and beyond her current role. Great performers want to be stretched, pushed, and empowered. Second, it helps prepare them for when they interview for a leadership role, as it gives them real experiences to learn from and talk about. Finally, it helps them be better managers when they get the job. This is important because if you’ve done your job as their manager well, then they will get the job.
Recently I asked Brent what this meant to him at the time and how these actions made an impact on him. He said,
Knowing that [my manager] thought of me as a leader and helped to develop my skills within the organization acted as a huge motivator for me. Not only did you provide me with an opportunity to grow for the future while within my current role, but you encouraged it and invested heavily in me doing so. This additional challenge of achieving above and beyond my “9 to 5” was a big motivator for me.
Working with you, while I was still a sales rep, to help me facilitate the mock sales calls with the newer reps on the team was one action that allowed me to be more ready to take the leap into a management role, but also to improve my skills as a rep. Having the opportunity to listen and hear what good and bad sounded like from a different perspective was beneficial in my day-to-day as a rep. This allowed me to practice providing both constructive and critical feedback. I found this to be so beneficial, that it remains a core component of the sales culture where I work today, nine years later—focusing intensely on the notion that practice should be harder than the game.
Part of creating an environment where people want to do excellent work is having a track record of your team members growing into new roles and earning promotions. One of my proudest moments as a manager was when people like Brent earned a promotion. Their success or failure was something I felt responsible for (and still do).
It’s much like a head coach helping his assistant coaches prepare to be head coaches themselves. The most excellent coaches have done more than just win championships. They have also created a legacy of other leaders—a “coaching tree” whose branches reach far and wide in their respective sports over time.
The name Bill Walsh is synonymous with winning in the NFL. After turning the San Francisco 49ers from perennial losers to the best team in the NFL, Walsh went on to win three Super Bowls. Even more impressive, though, is the success that other coaches have gone on to have after having learned the craft as an assistant coach under Walsh. Bob Glauber, a sportswriter for Newsday and author of Guts and Genius: The Story of Three Unlikely Coaches Who Came to Dominate the NFL in the ’80s, wrote about Walsh’s legacy, and how it all started. Here’s how Glauber described it: “Bill Walsh was so upset he was passed over as Bengals head coach by Paul Brown (in 1976) that he promised himself that if he ever did get a head coaching job, he would make it a point to help develop other coaches. He started what I think is the most productive coaching trees in pro sports history, not just the NFL.”13
After Walsh retired in 1989 after his third Super Bowl win, four of his disciples went on to win Super Bowl championships of their own as head coaches: George Seifert (49ers: 1990, 1995), Mike Shanahan (Broncos: 1998, 1999), Mike Holmgren (Packers: 1997), and Doug Pederson (Eagles: 2018). “[Walsh] knew how to train coaches and he concentrated on it and it meant a lot to him to see them become successful coaches,” said Glauber. It is not an accident that Bill Walsh not only goes down in history as one of the greatest coaches ever, but his legacy lives on as someone who helped develop others into excellent leaders. As a new manager, it is never too early to start thinking about this and acting with the intention of developing future leaders. Your impact could become bigger than the mere performance of your team alone could ever achieve.