Dear Farillio member,

On 9th April 2021, you asked our fabulous expert Carl Reader on the Go Far Fast Show:

"What's your advice when you take someone on and it's not really working out? I'm really worried this will damage the way that my new joiners feel about working in my business.”

And Carl said:

Be mighty always, Farillio

Transcript:

“It's a really valid concern to have and a concern that needs to be addressed straight away. I've only learned through this through my own experience. I've been preaching things like you need to hire slowly, fire quickly and so on, but I wasn't necessarily implementing this in my own business. It's human nature. What happens is that we employ somebody and often the employment decisions have been made on the wrong basis – we’ve employed them through need rather than want. We've needed the capacity and we’ve needed the team members. Then, in turn, we've hired based on skills because we need them up and running quickly. We've gone for the first few candidates that have come through the door rather than waited and chosen more carefully. The problem we have when we do that is that we allow fear to dictate the recruitment process and we don't necessarily get under the skin of who the human is. In the book, I talk about the fact that we need to look at the person. Will they do the job? Will they fit in with the team? Then and only then we assess what their skill level is and if they can do the job. This is just to determine how much training we need to give rather than determine whether they get the job. It's the complete opposite of what most businesses do. They look at can they do the job and then can we get on with them. We need to do it the other way round because most people get hired on skills but then fired on personality or attitude. You cannot train a personality or an attitude, somebody’s either got it or they haven't. When it comes to having a team member that could upset the dynamic, it's a really big concern. Unfortunately, team members that are pulling in a slightly different direction or with a slightly different motivation or ambition can sometimes be cancer in the organisation. You can have a negative person in a team of positive people or, on the flip side, you might have a positive person in a team of negative people. Whatever way around you got it, hopefully it's the first and not the second, it will upset the team dynamic and it will cause frustration. Ultimately it will chip away from the morale of everybody. Plus, if you got people who perhaps aren't aligned to the businesses, values, goals, vision and so on, then again you have people firing in different directions. Whilst they might feel that they're doing the right thing, the reality is that everybody else feels that they are being carried. It causes a really difficult situation. My strongest advice is that if you've got this got feeling that there is a problem, address it head-on. Don't wait for it to escalate and become a real problem. I've allowed these things to escalate and to become a real problem. We've had to dismiss an employee on the spot for punching a wall in the office. If I was to answer very honestly, openly, and being vulnerable here; we probably could have identified the problems that were leading up to that beforehand, but we didn't. That was our mistake, that was our error. We allowed it to escalate to a situation where this team member allowed his way of behaving to become an outburst in the office. We should have nipped that in the bud a month before. I'm not suggesting that that's the situation you've got, but if there's negativity, if there's anything like that, nip it in the bud. Have a frank conversation and it might be that the outcome isn't what you want. The challenge that we have as individuals, and Merlie this is a subject I'm really passionate about, the challenge is that generally people like other people. As a small business, when you have a chat with somebody about their future, whether it's on performance or conduct, you can be tough and think you're Alan Sugar, but the reality is that you're thinking this person’s got to pay their mortgage next month. This stuff does go through your mind regardless of how hard-nosed you think you are. It really does go through your mind and what I would say to that is that you really need to have some separation in your mind between the personal aspect. You might really feel torn personally about this, but you also need to look at the business. As an individual, you need to look at the other employees as individuals and weigh up what's right for the business. It's really difficult and there's no easy way around this other than becoming more hard-nosed and ignorant, which I don't think is a great trait in any business owner. However, you need to somehow build that separation in your mind and detach the emotions of care and respect for the individual. You need to do it in a caring way and you need to do it respectfully, but you also need to be caring and respectful of the rest of the team members and the business itself.”

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Want more from Carl?

You can also find Carl’s answers to other questions being asked by you and your community in our Dear Farillio Expert section on our blog site, and Carl’s great guidance on business here.

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