Podcast EP 127 | How to Deal with an Underperforming Executive

How do you deal with an under­per­form­ing executive?

Exec­u­tives per­form the most impact­ful and impor­tant roles in your com­pa­ny. Weak exec­u­tives cre­ate weak teams, which start to rot the com­pa­ny from the inside out.

Some­times we have good peo­ple who we trust, but they per­form at a B lev­el. They score high on the core val­ues but score low on pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. These peo­ple can be dif­fi­cult to deal with, and excep­tion­al­ly dif­fi­cult to deal with if it’s a CEO deal­ing with a B per­former executive.

This week, Kevin Lawrence and Brad Giles share sto­ries they’ve seen where lead­ers have dealt with a B play­er exec­u­tive well, and sto­ries where they haven’t. Through these sto­ries, they share best prac­tices for deal­ing with an under­per­form­ing executive.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Brad Giles 00:13

Hi there, wel­come to the Growth Whis­per­ers where every­thing we talk about is build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies. My name is Brad Giles, and today as always joined by my co host, Kevin Lawrence from Van­cou­ver, Cana­da. G’day Kevin, how are things today?

Kevin Lawrence 00:28

Awe­some. Yes, it’s nice. It’s get­ting a lit­tle dark here. But as always, things are going well, we’re just start­ing to see peo­ple get fired up into the fall sea­son, as we call it here. And there’s lots hap­pen­ing. Peo­ple com­ing out of sum­mer mode and look­ing for some help to sharp­en up their com­pa­nies as we go into the end of the year and the begin­ning of the new year.

Brad Giles 00:52

Very good. So let’s jump right into it. What is your word or thought of the day what might be on your mind today? As you think about that, this is some­thing that we encour­age all teams to start a meet­ing with just some­thing to shake it off, get ready, get started.

Kevin Lawrence 01:14

I think it’s the val­ue in being a jerk.

Brad Giles 01:20

That’s not what I thought you were gonna say.

Kevin Lawrence 01:24

It’s like there’s a time and place for it. I’m lis­ten­ing to this audio­book right now, Antho­ny Bour­dain, it’s called medi­um arrives, I think, I believe it’s the last book he wrote. And you know, he’s a very well known chef wrote a book called Kitchen Con­fi­den­tial, almost like a crit­ic of the chefs and not a food crit­ic so much, but a crit­ic of the indus­try and you know, he trav­eled around the world try­ing amaz­ing foods, and unfor­tu­nate­ly, he end­ed up tak­ing his life. And in the book, he talks about his strug­gles with men­tal health and, and things like that. But, you know, there was there was times in the book where he was known to be a bit of a jerk in many dif­fer­ent ways. And I think in many ways, he could be a good guy, and he could be a jerk. But, you know, real­ly made me think there’s times when you real­ly need to be strong, and almost put your foot down and not endors­ing being a jerk, per se, but there’s times where you need to be strong. And some things just need to be said. And he had a whole dia­tribe about how there were some major things wrong in the food busi­ness, par­tic­u­lar­ly. In some parts of pro­tein pro­cess­ing, I’ll save it for those who want to read the book, but he just like, it’s like some­body is like, some things are just wrong. It’s not right. And you know, and some­times you got to be a jerk about it to kind of get some atten­tion on it and get some ener­gy behind it. So I might change that to maybe some­times it’s impor­tant to real­ly take a stand and be direct, rather than a jerk. I just thought about jerk when I’m think­ing about him, but we’ll keep it as some­times it’s good to be a jerk.

Brad Giles 03:03

Okay. So for me, it’s, I got to see Jim Collins speak a few weeks ago. And it was, as always real­ly good. But one of the things that he said that real­ly struck me was about COVID. And he said that COVID is quite pos­si­bly the largest return on luck event that’s going to hap­pen in our lives. So how have you cap­i­tal­ized on that event? He just put con­text, he, he says that, luck is a real thing. And great com­pa­nies cap­i­tal­ize on luck when they get a luck event. They make the most of it.

Kevin Lawrence 03:47

And so it is research, he said, It’s not that they actu­al­ly have bet­ter luck, knows good luck and bad luck. They just know how to cap­i­tal­ize on a luck event that some­times can swing the oth­er way.

Brad Giles 03:58

Yeah. And so he’s it just was a per­spec­tive that I’d nev­er thought of, what are you doing to cap­i­tal­ize on that event?

Kevin Lawrence 04:11

It’s inter­est­ing is you say that Brad, because I know, dur­ing COVID, our firm, dou­bled in a num­ber basi­cal­ly dou­bled in size. And I know of oth­er bou­tique con­sult­ing firms, I know, one that col­lapse dra­mat­i­cal­ly. Because they played the cards dif­fer­ent­ly. They did­n’t they read they read it and played it dif­fer­ent­ly. We had a dra­mat­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent approach than they did. And we had a con­ver­sa­tion, you know, as COVID was, you know, three quar­ters of the way through, and I shared with them things they’re like, what? Oh, because they were expect­ing me to say that our busi­ness was down and it was far from that.

Brad Giles 04:47

And you know, what is fun­ny draw­ing on what you just said? He also said that there are peo­ple through­out the pan­dem­ic who dou­bled down they were like, Whoa, this is a whole All new sit­u­a­tion, we’re going to work real­ly, real­ly hard and get into it and get stuff done. And they were like, they worked hard­er than they’ve ever worked. And then oppo­site. There were peo­ple who are like, I got­ta catch up on my Net­flix. But his point was, find the peo­ple who worked the hard­est, and real­ly dug down and sin­gled them out and pro­mote them, like, these are the future lead­ers of your busi­ness. And I thought that was real­ly good, because they’re the ones that are tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty in crit­i­cal situations.

Kevin Lawrence 05:43

They’re the peo­ple who step up in tough times, those the ones you want to go to war with. And it was kind of like the War of COVID. So in today’s show, we’re talk­ing about how to deal with an under­per­form­ing exec­u­tive, now, it could be an exec­u­tive or a senior leader, any­one, but we’re look­ing at, you know, more in the board room. And it kind of the key thing here is that these exec­u­tives are crit­i­cal roles in our com­pa­ny, they set the tone for a lot of things and mak­ing sure things get done. And you know, we exec­u­tives gen­er­al­ly cre­ate weak or weak per­form­ing teams, which starts to rot their com­pa­ny from the inside out, it all starts to fall apart. And even though it’s one part of the divi­sion, that can get real­ly weak, and it can suck the whole com­pa­ny down.

Brad Giles 06:31

So let’s just frame it this way. Maybe you would like to go out and have a beer with them or have din­ner with them? Like, yeah, you’d love to hang out.

Kevin Lawrence 06:42

I got I got a list of those peo­ple, I’d love to go for a beer with, I just would­n’t want to have them work­ing in any of my clients.

Brad Giles 06:49

Yeah. And, and, like you liked their com­pa­ny, and they’re good to hang around. But each time you get the data, like, they’re just not con­sis­tent­ly cre­at­ing the num­bers that they need to. And it’s this hor­ri­ble feel­ing that you get, it’s like, why can I just get them to do what it says on the job score­card? Where are they just do their job? Well, they just did a job, like they seem like a good per­son. So this is what we might call B players.

Kevin Lawrence 07:21

Yeah, you love them. They fit the cul­ture, but they con­sis­tent­ly don’t per­form that well. You need to step down a lit­tle bit out of your role to man­age them, fol­low up with them, sup­port them. They are just not, you know, an incred­i­ble per­former that you can always count on. But they’re real­ly nice, and they’re trust­ed. And that’s why we often hang on to them. There’s two cat­e­gories of under­per­form­ing com­pa­nies nor­mal­ly hang on to B play­ers, we love them. And we’re loy­al to them, but they’re mediocre. The oth­er cat­e­go­ry is tox­ic A play­ers that are high per­form­ing, but they are jerks, tak­ing into account the word I used up front. And so these B play­ers can clog up a sys­tem because they just they, they gen­er­al­ly don’t help to cre­ate amaz­ing out­comes in the busi­ness, even though we like them and love them. And you know, in the years of doing this, those are the hard­est ones, we’ve had to let many of them go. And how­ev­er, we’ve also had to demote a bunch of them and get or give them notably less respon­si­bil­i­ty, which can be a great solu­tion. It’s just real­ly hard to deal with. And gen­er­al­ly, most of the CEOs we work with, they nor­mal­ly up until we come on just kind of let it roll. And there’s big­ger, big­ger fish to fry in our mind. And unfor­tu­nate­ly, it cre­ates a lot of sec­ondary and third, third tier issues.

Brad Giles 08:43

Because we have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to cre­ate the results. And yes, we have a duty as lead­er­ship posi­tions to help peo­ple to get the results. But some peo­ple don’t know they’re either not going to get there or they’re slow to get there. It takes them too much time to get there.

Kevin Lawrence 09:02

And maybe there’s a lot of oth­er fac­tors, you know, they could be in the wrong job, they could have the wrong man­ag­er, they don’t might not even know. So we’ll dig into some answers some good exam­ples. But to start with, we’ve got oth­er episodes that you can lis­ten to that would relate to some of these prin­ci­ples. You know, num­ber 71 is about how to use SMART goals with your team to have you know, clear account­abil­i­ty 72 and 73 about how the best lead­ers cre­ate team account­abil­i­ty. So set­ting up account­abil­i­ty, and we’ll touch on some high­lights of that today. And then num­ber 123 is Sev­en valu­able ways to help devel­op mid­dle man­agers because, you know, there’s many dif­fer­ent ver­sions of what could fix this. Also in my book, Your Oxy­gen Mask First chap­ter 10 Make your­self use­less, which is about build­ing a strong team that deliv­ers bet­ter results than you do with­out you. And Brad and your book.

Brad Giles 10:00

So it’s about the five roles of a CEO called Made to Thrive. And the first chap­ter is there is account­abil­i­ty for all employ­ees and sup­pli­ers and the five things that you need to do to ensure that you can get that. So there’s some good resources there maybe, like this start off with an exam­ple, is the sales man­ag­er, I start­ed work­ing with a team. And the sales man­ag­er had a sales team, I don’t know, maybe 20 or 30 peo­ple in the sales team. And it was a love­ly guy, quite enter­tain­ing as sales­peo­ple often are, which is a great trait, I love it. But, you know, he just did­n’t dri­ve the results. So he had a part time, he was kind of, I guess, late 40s, ear­ly 50s. And he had a part time hob­by, which was real estate. So a lot of his ener­gy would go into his real estate port­fo­lio. Now, that was a, you know he did­n’t have hun­dreds of prop­er­ties. But you know, I think he had a few, and they kept him busy. And that was real­ly where his pas­sion lied. And so often­times, we would be won­der­ing, where is he or cer­tain­ly the CEO would tell me that they were won­der­ing, you know, like, he popped out, and then he had to go and, you know, fix a leak­ing tap, or there was some­thing else that he’d find out about, but he’s real­ly, you know, he’s got this team of sales­peo­ple who could be great. And they weren’t. And so we had sev­er­al con­ver­sa­tions about that. And we con­tin­ued to dri­ve the account­abil­i­ty that we need. And this per­son, you know, I don’t know if he could­n’t or did­n’t want to, but the, you know, the ele­phant in the room was real­ly that this per­son had a real estate hob­by. That was their pas­sion. And they did­n’t real­ly want to be part of a scal­ing com­pa­ny. They want­ed to be just in a job that would pay enough that they could do the oth­er things. We sub­se­quent­ly we increased the account­abil­i­ty over time across the whole busi­ness. He did­n’t love that he end­ed up resign­ing. And then we brought in an amaz­ing a play­er. And sub­se­quent­ly, we saw the rev­enues in the busi­ness. Yeah, look, it took six months or some­thing. But it real­ly took off.

Kevin Lawrence 12:29

So in that case, when you actu­al­ly cre­at­ed the account­abil­i­ty that prob­a­bly should have been there in the first place. Yeah. He said, Hmm, I’m not real­ly signed up to do this full time job thing with all these account­abil­i­ty, so I’ll go some­where else?

Brad Giles 12:41

Yeah, pret­ty much.

Kevin Lawrence 12:44

Yeah, I’ve had lots I had a sim­i­lar one with a sales man­ag­er at a dif­fer­ent sce­nario. But the sales man­ag­er was dra­mat­i­cal­ly under­per­form­ing. The CEO want­ed to fire him from every­thing I heard about the guy was like, What are we doing? One of my team went in and did a bit of an assess­ment with this gen­tle­man, the head of sales it was and start­ed coach­ing him because we want­ed to try and give them a chance. They were loy­al to him, he had some shares in the com­pa­ny, and it was, you know, well, what my team mem­ber found is, the per­son actu­al­ly did­n’t know how to be a sales man­ag­er. He got giv­en the job because he had the gift of the gab. He was a tech­ni­cian. And then he was run­ning a sales team. So he was­n’t I don’t think work­ing as hard as he could have. But he actu­al­ly did not know what to do at all. There was no struc­ture, no account­abil­i­ty, and no even sys­tem for him to run. He was lost, just pure­ly lost. So the mem­ber of my team got in there, start­ed get­ting him to have plans, goals, think­ing about the team think­ing about vis­it­ing cus­tomers cetera, all of a sud­den, his per­for­mance start­ed to get bet­ter and bet­ter and bet­ter. So it was tight­en­ing up the account­abil­i­ty. But it was also in this case, he need­ed help he need­ed capa­bil­i­ty to be able to do it. So that was a, you know, a dif­fer­ent but as a suc­cess sto­ry. And anoth­er sim­i­lar one we had, and I had of the finance func­tion in a com­pa­ny that I work with. And the per­son in the role was awe­some, like, great to chat with per­son­able, but they were con­sis­tent­ly fail­ing on what they were doing. Yeah. So you know, and when we do strat plan­ning ses­sions, we break out the KPIs and the goals by exec­u­tive and they came to a meet­ing and every­thing was right, a sec­ond meet­ing in a row, every­thing was red. And we hap­pen to do a 360 at that time, too. And then the CEO was able to have a con­ver­sa­tion and I was prob­a­bly a lit­tle bit and say­ing, Look, we think you’re awe­some. We real­ly do want you on the team. But you can see based on the results in the meet­ing In, this isn’t going to work. So you have a choice that you can step up, and I want you to, or I’m gonna have to make a change because I can’t, like the stuffs got to get done. And from every­thing I knew, in that sit­u­a­tion, if I had to make my best guess my best guess would be, they would­n’t have made it. That per­son stepped up and isn’t a play­er these days, you know, they might have days where they’re an A minus, but they’ve done an incred­i­ble job. And but because it was, the sys­tem was so clear, and the CEO had the real con­ver­sa­tion with them. And they found a way to pull up their socks, like it was absolute­ly inspir­ing, and absolute­ly, just freak­ing awesome.

Brad Giles 15:54

Yeah, so many times, peo­ple get pro­mot­ed, because they’re a good tech­ni­cian, as you kind of indi­cat­ed there. And tech­ni­cian could be in any role, right? They’re doing a good job, they get a pro­mo­tion. But do they real­ly want to do that new job, give me the more give me the high­er pay. But do they real­ly want to do that new job and take the respon­si­bil­i­ty often for hold­ing oth­er peo­ple who used to be their team­mates account­able. And, and some­times that can be a bit of a prob­lem, I think about one team that I work with, we’ve got a, we’ve got a per­son was kind of pro­mot­ed from super­vi­sor to man­age, you know, love­ly guy, just, you know, the kind of guy again, that you’d love to go and have a beer with. And he was a great par­tic­i­pant in our lead­er­ship team work­shops. But he went through a jour­ney, where he real­ized he just did­n’t want to do the job. And I tell you what, I was so proud of this guy. Because he, he took it in such a hum­ble, he did­n’t take it. No, he came to the con­clu­sion. And I stress test­ed it with him. And I was like, Look, are you sure? Because you know that that that this pay rate is dif­fer­ent to that pay? Right? Are you sure? And he kind of said, I know that I know what that oth­er job deliv­ers. And I don’t want to do that oth­er job. Like the high­er the senior role. I want to stick at the super­vi­so­ry lev­el. It’s, it’s, you know, it’s what I do, but I haven’t been able to make those num­bers. So. So that was a, I think, an unusu­al, unfor­tu­nate cir­cum­stance that was prob­a­bly most­ly to do with that com­pa­ny’s strong cul­ture. But you know, so often, it’s hard, it’s hard, we get an exec­u­tive that isn’t mak­ing the num­bers. And, and they use their, you know, their friend­ship, their per­son­al­i­ty, every­thing to just con­tin­ue to do that.

Kevin Lawrence 18:08

Yeah. So last one I’ll share it was one of the Mid­dle East I worked with where it was a direc­tor or a VP, I think under an SVP, but the sec­ond lev­el of lead­er­ship, and I’ve worked with this guy for about a decade, I knew this guy very well liked him. And I knew he was chal­lenged. But there was a new leader run­ning that divi­sion. And the new leader after a year or so want­ed to get rid of the guy and said, This guy’s no good. He’s got­ta go. And I’m like, this is a long time. This is a com­pa­ny that’s loy­al to peo­ple always wants to make sure peo­ple try to, you know, treat it right. But it kind of came not out of the blue. But the leader was so strong and pas­sion­ate about fir­ing this per­son very quick­ly. It just did­n’t feel right, and want to ask them what the issues were. And he explained them. And I was kind of an advo­cate for doing the right things in that com­pa­ny. So long sto­ry short, when I asked the exec­u­tive explain it, it was­n’t clear. I had a meet­ing because of some­thing else. I had a meet­ing with that per­son and I’m the exec­u­tive. And I had the exec­u­tive artic­u­late what need­ed to hap­pen. And he was­n’t clear at all. I asked the exec­u­tive to write out what need­ed to hap­pen. And he was­n’t clear, long sto­ry short, even though it looked, you know, the exec­u­tive made a clear case, I was­n’t con­vinced because there was some his­to­ry there. But what I end­ed up need­ing to do because the exec­u­tive could­n’t make a clear case of what the per­son had to do. He was just more frus­trat­ed. And so I had the exec­u­tive make a list of five spe­cif­ic things that this guy need­ed to do to keep his job. The three of us had a meet­ing. The truth is, we had ques­tions about the exec­u­tive at this point, we weren’t even sure about him. That’s why I was involved. So the exec­u­tive and his employ­ee. Yeah. And because the exec­u­tive was no, we’re still check­ing. Long sto­ry short, we made the list, all three of us aligned around the list. And I said to the, to the direc­tor, hey, you’re crys­tal clear on what you got to do. Great. So when I was back there the next quar­ter, because I went every quar­ter to meet with them. For oth­er things, I just had a quick meet­ing with these guys said, Okay, let’s talk about how we did. And we went through the list and the direc­tor had achieved about 40, or 50% of things on the list. And I said to the direc­tor, well, you know, you put your exec­u­tive in a very tough posi­tion here, you were giv­en a chance and clear­ly told what you need­ed to do. And you did­n’t do it. Yeah. So this is between the two of you. But I said, was this crys­tal clear? Yes. Did you have the resources? Yes. I said, what hap­pened and he sort of, you know, made up a sto­ry, but because it was so darn clear that he basi­cal­ly fired him­self. And that’s, it is, and it’s as fair and humane as pos­si­ble, it both­ers me great­ly. If peo­ple get fired out of the blue, now, there’s cer­tain things that it might need to be. But if you haven’t artic­u­lat­ed the sit­u­a­tion, and giv­ing peo­ple chances, it’s like they should fire them­selves, even though they’ll still react and be shocked or what­ev­er. But they should­n’t be fir­ing them­selves because they choose not to do what needs to get done in that job.

Brad Giles 21:30

But I’m going to raise a big red flag at this point. Because and, and this is to do with some­thing that we’ve spo­ken about a few times recent­ly, which is the win­dow ver­sus the mir­ror, all of the exam­ples that we’ve pro­vid­ed, have been look­ing out the win­dow rather than in the mir­ror. And so what that means is, look­ing out the win­dow is a Jim Collins phrase, which means when some­thing hap­pens, we look out the win­dow to blame oth­er peo­ple, rather than look­ing in the mir­ror and say­ing, Okay, what am I done to cre­ate this? under­per­form­ing sit­u­a­tion? Yep, I’ve got a case that occurred recent­ly, where we’d launched in anoth­er coun­try, we’d sent a senior exec­u­tive over to that oth­er coun­try. And they were under­per­form­ing. And I took a call with the CEO. And they were like, look, I think that I need to, should I bring this per­son back to Aus­tralia, and recal­i­brate them, get them in a dif­fer­ent posi­tion so that we can kind of start from scratch. And I was like, Okay, if we do that, there’s a pret­ty good chance they’re going to quit, you know, I know, this per­son is a high per­former. And I said, Well, before we do that, let’s just explore a com­plete­ly alter­nate oppor­tu­ni­ty, which is look­ing in the mir­ror. And so how clear­ly have you com­mu­ni­cat­ed this prob­lem to this indi­vid­ual? And, and he said, Well, we haven’t prob­a­bly had a one on one for three months. And I was away and the oth­er per­son was away, not bread, but the CEO was away, the oth­er per­son was away, we just real­ly haven’t con­nect­ed, okay.

Kevin Lawrence 23:19

And then awe­some often hap­pens also, in sit­u­a­tions where they don’t want to have to talk about this stuff, they avoid talk­ing to each oth­er. Whether that’s what hap­pened in that case, it becomes like, I don’t want to have to talk to them. I don’t want to have to deal with.

Brad Giles 23:32

Yeah, that was start­ing to have that sign. And I was like, Okay, so that’s one thing. Do they under­stand? Are they giv­en the sup­port? Or have they been sent to this new coun­try? Where to start up a new office? And they don’t feel like they’ve got the sup­port from you? Or the exec­u­tive team? Do they feel like they’re an island or part of our cul­ture? Long sto­ry short, I, we went through that, and he was like, Oh, my God, I’ve been look­ing at this the com­plete, wrong way. Oh, that’s awe­some. And I said, metaphor­i­cal­ly, why don’t you put your arm around this indi­vid­ual? Okay, and say, look, I think that, that we’ve real­ly let you down about A, B, C, D, E, F, G, all of these items. And we actu­al­ly that worked, turn that sit­u­a­tion around. And yeah, and the point was, that this per­son was poor. Their num­bers weren’t there. Okay. But there was things that were struc­tural­ly occur­ring that was mean­ing that this per­son thought, I’m not part of the exec­u­tive team. They don’t val­ue me and they’re kind of step­ping out. So it’s just a red flag don’t say how to deal with an exec­u­tive that’s under­per­form­ing and only look out the win­dow. Also look in the mirror.

Kevin Lawrence 24:49

That’s good, because if they’re not per­form­ing, and that’s why I think it’s our job because have we made our­selves clear most of it. What I’d say is we need to iso­late our­selves. As the vari­able that is the prob­lem, right that that’s, they basi­cal­ly remove our­selves from the equa­tion because often the man that the man­ag­er does­n’t do enough, because they’re fed up, and they’ve almost res­i­dent resigned to the fact that they’re not going to make it in their mind. And that’s not fair. So there’s a few basics that we always make sure you pick them up in the sto­ries. One, are their crys­tal clear expec­ta­tions that get report­ed on reg­u­lar­ly, ide­al­ly, at least month­ly for all of them, for sure, quar­ter­ly. And that’s, you know, there’s finan­cial tar­gets, they have to hit for their team, there’s KPIs that tell the health of the their oper­a­tions, and then there’s goals or rocks or pri­or­i­ties, what­ev­er you call them that they need to achieve. But those three spe­cif­ic account­abil­i­ties are there on a reg­u­lar basis being reviewed, oth­er goals got to be smart, they got to be aligned to the strat­e­gy, they got to be smart. So you can mea­sure it and tell if peo­ple are per­form­ing. And they can tell them per­form­ing. And I think the ide­al is, they should be able to self man­age, because their objec­tives are so clear in most com­pa­nies. It’s is clear as mud. So the man­agers often and again, when we go into com­pa­nies with a first things we do is get goals for every­body in the room. Because then we can start to see who’s who in the zoo, because I’ve been conned by charm­ing peo­ple in those rooms before. Remem­ber a guy that was head of mar­ket­ing, the most loved guy in the whole com­pa­ny by every­one? He did­n’t get any­thing done. The man could he tell a sto­ry and it was great to go for beers with. But you know, once we start­ed hav­ing clear account­abil­i­ties, it was clear, and he end­ed up hav­ing to get fired because he could­n’t get things done. So basi­cal­ly, the basics Clear, clear account­abil­i­ties goes back to the book, The One Minute Man­ag­er, make sure the goals are clear. And if they don’t achieve their goals, go back and dou­ble check. They’re clear. And if they were, then go back and give feed­back and get them to reset it and try again. Yeah, um, the month­ly report­ing I talked about, and then you got to take time to think about this your­self. Like, what, like, you talked about Brad, and you got to think, what is my role in this? What can I do? How can I sup­port them bet­ter. And at the end of the day, once you go through that, if it’s still not work­ing, then you prob­a­bly need to, quote write them up. Yeah. And putting stuff like a for­mal­ly putting stuff in writ­ing say­ing this isn’t work­ing. And a lot of com­pa­nies have what they call a pip a per­for­mance improve­ment plan, but there’s a notice, you’re fail­ing to achieve your objec­tives, this is detri­men­tal to your abil­i­ty to main­tain your job. And then come up with an action plan, like I explained with the guy, that we had the meet­ing to out­line the goals what he need­ed to achieve. So when we get peo­ple to this, I, if some­one’s gonna get fired, I often will ask to see the doc­u­ment. And nor­mal­ly, they’re so damn vague, like the exam­ple I shared with you. It’s like no, it needs to be needs to work on your improve your behav­ior. Well, that’s not a SMART goal that says, you know, that’s a mile wide.

Brad Giles 28:17

But there needs to be a line in the sand, like a num­ber 99 is red. 100 is green, like a real­ly dis­tinct delin­eat­ed dif­fer­ence between suc­cess and fail­ure. And to your point, when we do per­for­mance reviews, we advo­cate that peo­ple have the man­ag­er write a per­son­’s per­for­mance on a KPI or pri­or­i­ty or what­ev­er it is red, amber green, but then sep­a­rate­ly, the indi­vid­ual rate their per­for­mance are green, because they’re talk­ing about the Delta. Well, why did you rate your­self green there? When I wrote a red?

Kevin Lawrence 28:55

We do the same when we do 360s, we get their per­cep­tion. And that’s why when we have exec­u­tive report­ing ses­sions and stress ses­sions, we get them to self report how they think they did all often ask, how would you rate your per­for­mance on a scale of zero to 10? This quar­ter to every­one indi­vid­u­al­ly? And then what are you going to do to take it up a notch? Yeah. And then if the CEO dis­agrees, they can jump in. So point of it is you need to at some point, you need to start tak­ing for­mal action, I strong­ly rec­om­mend involv­ing HR when you do that. So they help you to do it, right. They don’t do it for you. And some­times you invite HR to the meet­ing, which increas­es the seri­ous­ness of it or maybe you invite the CEO to the meet­ing, if appro­pri­ate. And then final­ly, it’s like, okay, how do you help them? Like if you’ve iden­ti­fied a gap and some­thing and are will­ing and you’re will­ing to invest in them? What are the resources that don’t just tell them to work hard­er? What is the course? Who is going to men­tor them? How are you going to teach them bet­ter? Who are they going to learn from? Are you going to get them a coach or You know, it’s impor­tant stuff. Again, none of this stuff is rock­et sci­ence. It’s real­ly, to kind of sum­ma­rize all of this stuff. If you’ve got an exec­u­tive who’s under­per­form­ing, you need to be able to ensure that they’re hav­ing clear expec­ta­tions to per­form to, and that they under­stand under clear, smart, tan­gi­ble expec­ta­tions. They need to have a con­ver­sa­tion with them, say, hey, there’s a gap between what you’re doing and what we’re expect­ing. And then some­how, you need to fol­low up on it to ide­al­ly see improve­ment, or see it fade. And if it does­n’t improve, you need to do some­thing dif­fer­ent. Maybe you change their job, maybe you split their job. Or maybe you ask them to the point there.

Brad Giles 30:45

You out­line the expec­ta­tions, they take the respon­si­bil­i­ty, and then it’s on them whether they step up, or step out, and you’ve got to be okay, because that’s what the com­pa­ny needs.

Kevin Lawrence 31:00

Yes. And if it does­n’t work out, it’s a base. No, at the end of the day, it’s like, if it’s not work­ing, it’s almost like they fire them­selves. And they are the ones who have cho­sen not to do it. And worst case sce­nario, by the way, if it isn’t going to work, how do you allow them to exit grace­ful­ly? How do you allow them and give them time to find anoth­er job ide­al­ly, or to take us quote, take a sab­bat­i­cal, but you also don’t kind of be a jerk about it now, if they’re steal­ing from you, or abus­ing your employ­ees or cus­tomers? Sure, you know, walk them out in hand­cuffs if need­ed, if that’s appro­pri­ate. But oth­er­wise, we’ll look at your guilty in this too, you might have been the per­son that hired them, or did­n’t men­tor them enough? Or maybe you pro­mot­ed them when you should­n’t have like, every­one’s got a role in this. How do you treat them respect­ful­ly and with as much dig­ni­ty as you can, if at all pos­si­ble if it comes down to the least desir­able outcome?

Brad Giles 32:02

Awe­some, what a good episode we’ve had here again, how to deal with an exec­u­tive that is under­per­form­ing. And ulti­mate­ly it comes down to you’ve got to be able to out­line the expec­ta­tions, make it clear to them and make the con­se­quence clear to them, as we’ve said, so you can find this pod­cast on YouTube search for the growth Whis­per­er is obvi­ous­ly where you can find it. Also, where as you prob­a­bly have, where all good pod­casts are found, you can find Kevin, his firm Lawrence and Co. At Lawrence and co​.com, you can find myself at evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com​.au And both of us have, I’d say pret­ty inter­est­ing newslet­ters that we put out every week.

Kevin Lawrence 32:50

We like to think so.

Brad Giles 32:53

So hope­ful­ly you’ve enjoyed the episode, and we look for­ward to chat­ting to you again next week. Do have your­selves a good week.