Lead Inside the Box by Mike Figliuolo & Victor Prince

Author:Mike Figliuolo & Victor Prince
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Career Press
Published: 2015-07-19T14:00:00+00:00

Part VI: Leading Detractors

Chapter 15: Detractors

It’s obvious to everyone that Detractors aren’t getting their job done. They occupy a valuable slot on your team, but don’t produce the commensurate results. They create a negative drag because they require leadership capital that could yield better results if invested elsewhere. When a mess happens with your team, chances are the Detractor is involved. Your Detractors consume a disproportionate amount of your time and create excessive stress.

Detractors make your team worse every day. Not only are they underperforming, but they’re also making everyone else’s jobs more difficult and less fun. Addressing Detractors aggressively is hard work that can be unpleasant, but it’s necessary. Left unchecked, they can sink your whole team—and even your career.

Detractors require rapid improvement, redeployment, or removal. Their behavior affects you negatively because you’re being worn down by all the stress they create. If Detractors don’t improve, they’re eventually going to fail professionally. They’re one corporate reorganization or layoff away from being unemployed. They feel the stress associated with their poor performance too. Similar to others on your team, they want to feel the sense of self-worth that comes along with being good at what they do.

In the short term—two to three months—increase your leadership capital investment in your Detractors to improve their performance or move them to a different role. Create a sense of urgency for Detractors. Make them understand their current performance isn’t acceptable. Detractors may have been in their situations for years, because many managers would rather avoid the problem for fear of creating uncomfortable interactions. They’re called “difficult conversations” for a reason! You owe it to the Detractor and the organization to fix the problem on your watch and not pass it along to the next manager. You have an obligation to the Detractor to tell him the truth about his performance. Do everything you can to improve his performance. Put yourself in his position—would you rather get a warning shot about your poor performance now, or would you prefer to be unexpectedly laid off because you weren’t meeting expectations? Leaders must deliver difficult messages, and do so sooner rather than later.

Personnel role changes are frequent. Weak managers may calculate that fixing a Detractor’s situation will require significant short-term effort, but fail to realize the benefit of her improved performance is a long-term payoff—that payoff may even come after the manager has moved to another team. The rational thing for a weak manager to do is to not invest in the Detractor because the manager gets no benefit from doing so. Short-term thinking like this is weak leadership. Strong leaders know better. You have a responsibility to think long-term. If the organization will benefit from you investing leadership capital in improving a Detractor, it doesn’t matter if that improvement happens while she reports to you or not. The organization is investing in you by paying your salary. The return you provide is building a better team than the one you were assigned. The reason you’re dealing with a Detractor might be because the leader before you didn’t invest in fixing the problem.

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