It can be quite common for leaders to be not satisfied with an executive or key employee.

However, it’s important not to allow that frustration to remain, but to understand why you are feeling this way. This means becoming clear on the gaps between your expectations, and actual performance, and then having a conversation with them so they are aware and have an opportunity to recalibrate and meet your expectations.

The failure of many leaders is experiencing this frustration, but keeping it a secret, which isn’t fair to either party. 

If you’re feeling that an executive might not be performing, in this episode we talk about why you should act on it, and we provide several tools on how to understand, assess, and act on it. 

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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.

00:13
Kevin Lawrence
Hey, and welcome to the Growth Whispers podcast with Kevin Lawrence and Brad Giles, where everything we talk about is about building enduring great companies that continue to grow and thrive as they move on for decades. Today is a bit of a special episode. 150. Brad, 150 times we have sitting here staring at each other, coming up with some good stuff to share with the audience. That’s pretty darn spectacular, I got to say.

00:42
Brad Giles
It’s a lot. 150 consecutive weeks we’ve come together and spoken about this stuff. Yeah, it feels pretty good, to be honest. It feels really good to just catch up, to learn from each other and to kind of go deep on some of these subjects. It’s really good.

01:03
Kevin Lawrence
It is. I got to say, as I’ve told you, I couldn’t have done this without you. The discipline to continue to do this. I’m a collaborator by nature and one collaborating together in the discussion is awesome. With collaboration comes a lot more accountability. We get into words of the day, my word of the day is collaborative accountability and it’s like, you’re not my boss, I’m not your boss. We collaborate, but we are accountable to each other because we want to be. In a strong collaborative relationship, I think it brings the best out of us. Congratulations on 150 and thank you for the collaborative accountability.

01:47
Brad Giles
Well, thank you as well. Yeah, I think that we our personality styles complement each other and we’re both quite curious by nature, which is good. My Word phrase of the day, ego is the enemy. It’s a book by a guy called Ryan Halliday. Probably my favorite book to recommend and consistently, year after year is the number one book that I’m kind of recommending to people. I’m rereading again at the moment. Just assume. Yeah, just to recalibrate, to rethink and to reassess. It’s just look, it’s old Stoic wisdom, but inside every one of us is our enemy. Our enemy is not our neighbor or our business partner or our ex husband or wife.

02:39
Kevin Lawrence
Between our ears.

02:41
Brad Giles
It’s between our ears. That’s exactly right. Yeah. So, collaboration and I’m not going to try to stitch those together because I never have and I never will. But that’s your job, Kev.

02:52
Kevin Lawrence
Chuck, you did get it once. I’m not even going to try.

02:55
Brad Giles
I bit my tailwind, though.

02:58
Kevin Lawrence
Healthy collaboration can also be very good for managing an ego.

03:02
Brad Giles
Yeah.

03:03
Kevin Lawrence
Healthy collaboration requires it. By the way, if you’re collaborating with someone whose ego is out of control, good luck. That’s a nightmare on that track. Have you read this one? Brad Rebel ideas.

03:13
Brad Giles
No.

03:13
Kevin Lawrence
It’s a really good book. I need to go back and read it again. Like, Ego is the enemy. Matthew Syed.

03:22
Brad Giles
Yes. That’s for audience who can’t see the video.

03:25
Kevin Lawrence
Yes. It is spectacular. It is an amazing book. In many ways, it’s similar to ego as the enemy and how ego can get in the way of good leadership. It’s not written from the ego perspective. It’s awesome. We could do a whole episode for 72 hours talking about our favorite books and the best principles.

03:45
Brad Giles
What’s that title again, please?

03:47
Kevin Lawrence
It is rebel ideas, the power of diverse thinking. Awesome book. We’re discussing it this week at one of our client meetings. So, hey, let’s dig into the show. Basically today is, hey, I think I’ve got an executive. It’s ineffective. What do I do? We’re going to do something and we’re going to dig into it. The reality is, the most important thing is that you do something, you do it now because executive roles are critical. The little secret is, if you think that the executive is ineffective, they probably are because you’re their boss. Whether it’s an executive or director, generally your instincts are pretty good in the role that you’re in. We got to make sure jump bot Brad shaking his head and shaking his hand like there’s something going on. Do tell.

04:46
Brad Giles
But they probably are. The real question is, why are they ineffective and what do you do about it? That’s the thing. They probably are. I totally agree. Your gut is often accurate, if not intuitive. We need to pay attention to that, but don’t do nothing. Many leaders are like, you know what? My last boss was an ahole. I don’t want to be that ahole boss and never going to be like that. They let stuff slide and slide and accountability is nonexistent. People think that you just don’t care when you don’t hold people accountable.

05:30
Kevin Lawrence
Well, you don’t. You’re trying to be nice, but being super nice and not giving feedback is not good in leadership. So we’re going to dig into this. The key thing is you need to figure it out and get clear on what the truth is and get beyond feelings. To quote Jim Collins language, are they in the wrong seat or are they in the wrong bus? Or have they not been given the right direction by their manager, which is you or me or Brad. So it’s common. We hear this all the time. The key is to figure out what the performance gap actually is, to know it, and then once it, to see is it something that’s fixable? If it is fixable and can be, then the second thing most important is to take it from a secret to a solution that’s being worked on with them.

06:20
Kevin Lawrence
Getting back to that collaborative piece. For most people, as you said, Brad, the failure is the leader knows. They may or may not have thought about it, but they haven’t had the conversation. It’s not fair to them or you. You got it. Get it on the table and see if you can get them back to thriving again.

06:40
Brad Giles
Yeah. What are the facts, not the opinions? Because maybe you’ve had a bad day, maybe you haven’t slept enough. Maybe you’re not clear on your expectations. There’s a whole range of things. Come back to the fact, do they have KPIs or metrics? If they need to sell $1 million and they’ve sold $600,000, that’s a very good fact.

07:07
Kevin Lawrence
Right. If they have to sell and there’s no budget or nothing to compare to, well, then it’s not a fact, it’s a feeling.

07:14
Brad Giles
Exactly.

07:15
Kevin Lawrence
In many cases, the expectations aren’t clear. So I’ll give an example. We have this one rock star executive. They were amazing in the role they were doing in the company. The company was growing. They were growing. All kinds of awesome things happened. We opened up another division of the company in a totally different location, far away, and this person went to go run that division, and it didn’t go well. Now, was it the division? Was it the person? The division, I think, had some fatal flaws, but the person also got into a role where they were an effective executive, but now they were running a full PNL and they did not thrive. They tried hard and was given resources. That division, in the end, the division, we got rid of the division, and the person came back into the core business and now is in a role where we learn more about the person in that role.

08:19
Kevin Lawrence
Now they’re in a role where they’re completely thriving. It’s the perfect role for them. They’re back to being an A plus player. For them, they weren’t overly effective, but it required a role change. When they made the role change, they got back into their sweet spot of doing their best work and absolutely thriving, and everyone is thrilled. And again, you make these experiments. Sometimes you try stuff, but they were a good person. Wrong seat.

08:47
Brad Giles
You briefly mentioned it before, jim Collins. Wrong seat, wrong bus. Jim Collins says that the job of a leader is to get the right people in the right seats, doing the right things the right way. He says, when we’ve got a problem with a key executive, are they in the wrong seat? Maybe they would thrive in another area, which was your story, or are they on the wrong bus? In other words, they’re just never going to fit into this company, and that’ll fit the culture. Yes, that’s right. That’s a part of what we’re saying here. But you’ve got to do something. I worked with a leader, and I think it was around four years we had this problem. We had a key executive who was a toxic A, and that’s not necessarily effective. This person was a toxic A.

09:38
Kevin Lawrence
Necessarily effective?

09:41
Brad Giles
No, he got the results right.

09:45
Kevin Lawrence
Culturally, toxic A is an A on performance, but toxic because they fail on culture. So they get the results. The joke is they’re normally in sales, but they’re just a nightmare for everybody else. For many people in the company.

10:05
Brad Giles
Yeah. Not necessarily ineffective because this person was making the numbers, but the attrition the number of people that had resigned was remarkable. This CEO sat around for four years and of course I’m there saying, what’s your number one concern? What are you going to do about it? How are we going to know what’s the line in the sand that this person has to cross? My point there is we’ve got to do something. We’ve got to do something.

10:37
Kevin Lawrence
Yeah. The root of it is trying to figure out what the problem is. I’ve got one executive, and this is an awesome executive. I love this guy. He was great. I think he was very good at his job. There were some nuances to the culture of this company that he couldn’t find a way to navigate. You wouldn’t say he didn’t meet the culture, but he was maybe lacking a few of the things in the culture. It was a pretty intense culture. He just when the CEO and I were having conversations because this guy wasn’t getting the results that we needed, there was a lot of challenges, but he just wasn’t wired for the dynamics of the culture. Good thinking. A lot of the right things just didn’t quite fit and he chose to move on, which was great for him and unfortunate in one way for the company because he’s a good person, but just generally with the dynamics, he wouldn’t have ever been able to make it.

11:34
Kevin Lawrence
Another one, and we see this a lot, where people’s personal issues get in the way often. One CEO I work with, the CEO says, hey, I know each of my executives is addicted to something, I just want to know what and then I can work with it. Obviously alcohol can be an issue, drugs can be an issue, gambling people can get high, strong executives have blow off steam, and sometimes it gets in the way. Drinking is a pretty common one, that there’s challenges around in our society, not just in the boardroom. We had one executive notable drinking issue, notably affecting performance, getting in the way when they were on the road, traveling in particular. The CEO who loved this person like a father said to the person, I have a choice. I can fire you or I can pay for you to go to rehab.

12:33
Kevin Lawrence
What do you want to do? Yeah, rehab doesn’t always work. This person went to rehab and this person had gone through a really rough patch in their life, like some really challenging things that happened, and they just overrelied on alcohol, I think, and went to rehab, goes to a got support, bounced back into a thriving A player role, which was wonderful. To see. Those personal issues, and I’ve seen so many of them where they just start to be a mess and they can’t do their job and they can’t function and they can’t get things done. Most companies don’t have the skills of the resources to deal with that. Obviously we want to talk to them, point them at resources, see if we can get them some help or they can get some help. At some point if people can’t get it together, they’re not going to be able to do their role.

13:26
Brad Giles
It was just that last week I was speaking with a leader about this very subject and I said to her, I said, look, this is going to go one of two ways and this is not the Brad thing. I’ve just seen this play out so many times. It’s only going to go one of two ways. Either you’re going to address this directly with the person, you’re going to outline the expectations of the company and yourself as their manager and they will then adhere to those expectations or they will exit. The second way is that your frustrations will boil over and it will cost you money. This feeling that this person is ineffective, those little tiny things will build and build until you lose steam, lose faith in the person or whatever and you say, this person’s got to go. If that’s an emotionally driven decision, yeah, not good.

14:20
Brad Giles
It can be very expensive.

14:22
Kevin Lawrence
Yeah, it can. And also ineffective. It also can be expensive financially and for your leadership because now you look like a hot under the collar leader who didn’t act professionally and your other rest of your team isn’t going to respect you. That’s a very dangerous. Let’s look at some of the principles that we’re talking about and we’ll share some more examples. The main thing here, you got a feeling, but you got to get to knowing feeling can be dangerous. We can be biased, we can be emotional, we can be frustrated. We got to get to knowing and really understanding this. As I said up front, often when this starts to be a concern, especially if it’s a regular concern, generally, the person usually ends up moving on. Generally, especially when it’s behavior stuff. Let’s go to one of things the Brad was talking about, get back to expectations.

15:13
Kevin Lawrence
We’ve done lots of things around scorecards and top grading and go back to the initial spec for the job and what’s expected and go and make sure that go and look at that and evaluate them against it and try and find where the block is. We do this a lot with CEOs. What is the actual issue?

15:32
Brad Giles
I wrote a book about it Onboarding. If the person doesn’t have a scorecard, the book that I wrote called Onboarded, it outlines the importance and how to build a scorecard and how to execute and implement it. It’s unfair to have a person not understand how to succeed in the role. They might be capable and they might want to succeed, but it’s unfair if we don’t help them to succeed. There could be other things that are going on, like maybe they’re going through a mental health crisis themselves, a divorce. There could be any range of things. Part of that is understanding the situation. Once we’ve got the facts, what is the real situations? Because it could be whilst instinctually or in pure textbook style, it could say if they’re ineffective, then just sack them. Well, maybe the first thing to do is to put your arm around them metaphorically, right?

16:37
Brad Giles
To say, we’re here to support you mentioned before, we’re happy to send you to rehab. It’s a really tough challenge, we want to help you get through this. You got to have the facts to underlie that second decision.

16:51
Kevin Lawrence
Go back and evaluate them based on the role and the questions that you have in your book. Brad, are they capable of succeeding in the role? Do they understand and do they want to you’re right for your mental health we talked about the other thing is we regularly do talent reviews where we go through and look at the key executives every 90 days and we evaluate them. Where are they at? We answer in our system 30, 40 questions about them and then we decide the development plan every 90 days. That’s why I’m relentless about this with the teams I work with. We’re at a two day meeting starting tomorrow, sorry, Wednesday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and this is Sunday that we’re here in this meeting. We will spend 2 hours going through all of the key people and I am looking to make sure that there is a mini development plan for every single key leader.

17:41
Kevin Lawrence
Really what that is hey, managers, do your job. That’s what you’re supposed to do every quarter. People don’t. Having a discipline to make sure that happens is something that we operationalize because then this stuff can only slip one or two or three quarters, no matter what it is. The route is then once what the issue is, to go and work with them, partner with them, to come up with reclarifying the expectations that must be met and then working with them on the how. What can we do to make this work but tangible in writing and then following up regularly. This is not like take a magic pill in the world is good. If it’s really casual, it could be a follow up every couple of weeks, every month. If it’s really intense, you might be having a meeting every single week. It’s working with them to get back on track.

18:36
Brad Giles
That really comes back to those three questions are they capable of succeeding in the role? Do they understand how to succeed in the role, and they want to succeed in the role, and if they’re capable of succeeding and they want to succeed, well, whether or not they are is on them, and that’s fine, and then that creates a different path. If they don’t understand, that’s kind of on the manager, and that’s the manager’s job. And that’s what we’re really saying. If we’re scoring each of those three out of ten, you really want to get an average of about eight for all of these to have confidence, to move forward. So a total of like, 24.

19:16
Kevin Lawrence
Jim Collins has a question. He has seven questions to decide whether you’re going to develop or replace. He shared one of his sessions, and we have that in episode 46. Listen to it if you want to dig in further. One of the questions is, are they more of a window or a mirror person? The simple explanation is, when things go wrong, do they point out the window and blame, or do they look in the mirror and learn? That one thing is a big predictor. There’s a lot of them, but that’s a very big predictor, because if they are always looking in the mirror and learning, we’re more likely to invest in that person because they’re going to get better and better. If they’re a blamer and we can’t seem to get them off of that, they’ll never learn, which means they’ll never change. Everything that we’re getting at is understanding this.

20:15
Kevin Lawrence
The final thing in the model is when you work out the plan, you often need to get them help. Like we regularly our team will go in and coach key executives we have a concern with. I’ll tell you about a head of sales. I was coaching this entrepreneur in a family business, and his head of sales was horrible. Every question I asked was like a no. I was asking about things heads of sales would do. Anyways, long story short, one of my team started coaching this guy, and we don’t know if we’re going to fire this guy in three months or not. When my team member got in there, he had no direction from the CEO, and he was a guy who was working in the business, who had a great personality to put him in sales. No sales. He was running a sales team.

21:06
Kevin Lawrence
No sales training, nothing. He was just a charming guy who go and talk to the customers. That was a failure of the organization. My team member said, well, hey, what about your sales meeting? What about your goals for your sales team? What about getting out? Like and they went through and he said, oh, okay, great. He was so willing and so capable, he just didn’t know what he was supposed to do. He was just playing office like other, quote, bosses did. Long story short, he got a clear plan alignment with the CEO to what a sales leader’s job actually is and the guy’s doing great but it was the CEO’s fault.

21:50
Brad Giles
Yeah that understand is always the leader’s fault because that’s their job. That’s their job to understand help them understand how to succeed. That’s what management is.

22:01
Kevin Lawrence
Yes. The idea here is that all that stuff is great but you can tell me as a young child that I’m not good with my timestables and mathematics and say Kevin go get better your times tables but if I don’t know how to that’s not fair right? You need to give people tools and guidance and support sometimes you might have to get them a coach, a mentor, send them on a course. You might need to spend an hour a day or a couple of hours a week teaching, coaching, training whatever it is. You often got to put some resource behind it to try and give it a real chance. Now in time you quickly see I mean most people have what I call the three week surge. You give feedback to most people. The good harder ones will always surge for a few weeks and do better.

22:55
Kevin Lawrence
They often slip back to their old ways. The real thing we’re looking for is the sustainable. It sticks and you’ll know you’ll see over 60 to 90 days for you normally in 90 days you can probably make the choice yeah going yep let me recommend you make the choice. Do we continue to invest or do we thank them for the time?

23:14
Brad Giles
Well if we circle back to the headline I have a key executive that I think is effective. What do I do? Well the first question is what does the scorecard tell us? Not the job description but the scorecard. The scorecard is a lot more definitive binary, metrics driven and if you don’t have a scorecard that’s where we’re saying begin with the facts, not the opinions. Your gut is probably telling you something and that’s something is we need to isolate the facts and then we need to talk about the facts and move forward. Many conversations I’ve had start with okay what’s the scorecard? What is that telling us? What is the real evidence here that we can focus on and then take action like we cannot make sure that this feeling won’t go away.

24:07
Kevin Lawrence
No you got to do and it’s the right thing to do to help. But I will say one other thing. I’ve seen it’s interesting. That’s also why we go back to scorecards. We also have psychometric assessments of things to understand how the person’s wired. I remember one of the things that one of the executives was failing on in one company was assertiveness. We go into top Grading and we look at the scorecard. Assertiveness is colored red, which says that it’s very difficult to change. Yes we go to psychometrics and we would look at a disc and the person had a D of eleven. What? Yeah. Which means a D is drive or driven for results and basically willingness to push through obstacles and or have conflict to get something done.

25:00
Brad Giles
It’s not going to change.

25:01
Kevin Lawrence
At eleven, at eleven, you’re not even going to have a tough conversation with an eleven year old. Right. Never mind an executive. Those people run from conflict. They just don’t do it at the end of the day. And it’s a tough situation. It’s like, well if the assertiveness a leadership trait, they’re not able to do it. And their D is eleven. Like it’s not even fair to them to be in that role because executive roles require a lot of conflict and that person, and it doesn’t mean that you can’t make a decision based on a Psychrometric. As we dug in and got the facts, we’re like, how did this person end up in his job in the first place? Because the way that they’re wired is not consistent with the environment that they need to thrive in.

25:47
Brad Giles
That’s brutal, isn’t it?

25:49
Kevin Lawrence
It is. This person was loved by everyone and that was over a decade ago. I still have contact with that person. I really admire that person. They’re smart and capable, but in those senior executive capabilities, the conflict and those types of the leadership in conflict, not them. So just going to wrap this up. The idea is as Brad did, look at, hey, you got to hunch something’s not right. Get the facts, truly understand the core issues the best you can. Understand what needs to happen. Work with them on a plan. Make sure they know there’s a gap that needs to be filled. A lot of people will appreciate it if you work with them respectfully and find a way. That’s what we hope for. We always want our job as leaders. The job of leaders is to develop leaders and build leaders. We don’t want to forget that in our work.

26:50
Brad Giles
Yeah, do something. Don’t exactly keep it a secret. Don’t let the frustration build.

26:56
Kevin Lawrence
No. So hey, thanks for listening. This has been the growth of Whispers podcast with Brad Giles down in Perth, Australia. Kevin Lawrence here in Vancouver, Canada. We’re glad you joined us. If you haven’t, please subscribe. If you want to rate it, if you liked it, let us know. Give it a good rating. That’s always appreciated for the video version. To see the video of this and see the reactions between us sometimes, which can be entertaining. YouTube and just search the growth. Whispers brad and I both have newsletters we put out every week, sharing the best things we just love to share. That’s the business that we’re in. You can get Brad’s and learn more about Brad and his firm evolutionpartners.co.au and mine is lawrenceandco.com, we’re here to help. If there’s something we can do to assist you, whether it’s to put something on the show or to help you in your company, let us know.

27:45
Kevin Lawrence
Have a great week.