Bill Gallagher walks through a framework for evaluating employees on two axes: fit with company values and performance in their current role. He uses a story about a struggling salesman to show how to decide whether to coach, reassign, remove, or retain people as your organization grows.
Well, for sure. People, People problems are by far the hardest part of growing and scaling your business. I had a guy working for me in a company years ago that was failing in his job at sales, but had all the right experience, all the right skills, experience, training, even a proven background, winning in sales with products of the kind that we had in the industry that we had, like, no logical reason why, right? So why are people so hard? What was it that I was missing? Did he hate our company? No. He had our values. He loved our company. You could see was right there, like the passion for the business. And yet he was failing. Right. So I had a conversation with him about his motivation, why he'd wanted sales before, how it lived for him. And he was kind of mystified too. He couldn't figure out what it was. But in the course of the conversation, I heard it. I heard the change in his life and his perspective, the shift in his values, his growing up, his path in life that was keeping him from being able to win at sales. He loved at this point, right? Taking care of people. He loved being of service. He loved, he loved helping people. But the need to win, the need for money, the need to like, close something, gone. So the earlier drive that he had that was more materialistic and competitive in nature was gone. But the desire to take care of people, to be helpful, that kind of thing was very high. So I had a hunch and I said, hey, let's try something. Let's move you into a service role. And suddenly he took off. Suddenly he was thriving. And I think that there's something there about this. So in our world, we have this thing called the talent assessment. It's a sort of two axis matrix. And the most important one is, does the person fit the company's values? So the fit to the company's values, the fit to the culture and values of the company is the most determining one. The that's your top to bottom, right, to be technical. And the less important one is the performance in the current role. So he was failing in his current role, but he really did fit the company values. So we just looked at why was he failing, and we realized that we had a job he maybe could do and we tried it and it worked. The key thing is that people that are winning in their role and, and people that really fit the company, those are your A players and those people you want to retain, the people that really fit the company but aren't winning in their current role, they either need some coaching or they might need a new role. And the people who are winning but don't fit the company. We had another person like that at one point who really didn't have the company's values at all. They had their own values, really distinct from the company values, but were really winning in their role in sales in particular, actually are creating a lot of damage to most companies, either internally or externally. Because they're winning, they're doing stuff, but they do it with a lot of commotion. They leave messes in their wake. They do things that aren't consistent with the values and those things aren't sustainable over time. So retain them, train them, or move their job. The people who are performing but don't get your company values aren't a match for that are creating big messes for you. You gotta get rid of them. And then the people that, that aren't really winning and don't really fit the values, we almost always have people like that. Those people are people that we say to ourselves, listen, I got bigger fish to fry. I'll deal with that later. You know, it's an issue, but you don't deal with it at the time. You tell yourself, look, I got something. They're better than nothing. They could fog a mirror. So I'm going to leave them in their job. But in fact, the A players, the people in the upper right, the people that are winning and fit the company, those people really hate working with the people that are just filling space right, and going through the motions. And in fact, you can let go of those people that don't fit the company and aren't really performing. And almost all the time, everybody else will pick up their slack. In some cases, you need to outsource that job. So that's our look. That guy, I moved him from sales to service. He thrived. He was a great contribution. He helped us actually hire his replacement. Somebody with a little more need to win and a little more financial motivation. Who did, who did fantastic in sales not long after. So anyway, I hope that's been helpful. Figuring out people problems, by far the hardest. It's certainly easier with the outside eyes of a coach or the listening of a coach in your business. If we can help you, let us know. In the meantime, keep scaling. We'll talk to you again soon.
