Cameron Herold says leaders who feel relieved when someone quits have failed. Instead, manage underperformers directly, have hard conversations about their role, and involve teams in hiring decisions. When revenue doubles, some managers outgrow their roles, and that's a conversation to have early.
Chapters
It really drives me crazy when an entrepreneur says, oh, I'm so glad that person finally quit. I've been wanting to fire them for six months. You've been doing a disservice to all the good employees to keep that person who's underperforming. Why do we spend all of our time with these underperformers? If somebody quits, even if it's a bad employee, then other people are going, well, I wish you would have fired them anyway. And maybe it's time for me to quit too. Sometimes it's okay to let that employee go and work somewhere else again and not feel bad about it. Just like as a parent, our job is to raise our children to a point where we can kick them out of the house so they can be successful adults on their own. We're not supposed to have our kids living with us when they're 40 years old, right? We're supposed to grow them and get them out as a company. Our job isn't to keep them with us forever. Maybe the way to really grow them is to let them go work somewhere else and maybe they'll speak good of the company or maybe they'll come back at a different point, but to bring in those people from the outside if you're going to have people staying. And I'll give you a good example. Years ago I had six full time people in PR and I was going to be building a national account sales team which we had no one working in sales yet. So I had the six people in PR interview the VP of sales, they interviewed all the final candidates with me and they picked their boss who then led PR as a sales function and then built out the sales team. But then they were super happy with who I selected because they picked them. And they also understood based on the interviews and based on the scorecard, they couldn't do this person's job. So that was a really elegant solution to get the team to be excited about who they got to report to. And it actually took a lot of the weight off my back because I didn't have to sell them on this new person. They picked them. If you haven't already signed up for my online training where I cover the 12 essential leadership skills for anyone who manages people, go check out investinyourleaders.com ch. Close to 5000 leaders are already going through my content. I think think it's better for a company to be in a position of strength versus a position of weakness. It really drives me crazy when an entrepreneur says, oh, I'm So glad that person finally quit. I've been wanting to fire them for six months. You've been doing a disservice to all the good employees to keep that person who's underperforming. Why do we spend all of our time with these underperformers and not even the toxic underperformers? These could be really good culture people that just aren't performing anymore. It is best to have those tough discussions. It is best to move them on. It is best to help them. But if you do it from a position of strength, then everybody else goes, oh shoot, I better get my stuff together, I better drive my results. Versus if somebody quits, even if it's a bad employee, then other people are going, well, I wish you would have fired them anyway. And maybe it's time for me to quit too because it gets people nervous. So you always want to act from a position of strength versus a position of weakness. And you can do it like you're letting your mom go, right? You don't have to do it and be a jerk. There's a level of maturity that can come in as an organization goes through some of those. You know, hire the jack of all trades, master of none. And boy, I'll tell you, back in the early days at 1,800 got junk. I was hiring every high culture person who could just throw their body at a problem and I would give them skill development on a weekly basis to try to get it done. But that's what we needed in the early days and it's what we could afford in the early days. And that was kind of a young adult, right? Just figuring it out, working hard, trying to get it all to go and then you become this 32 year old where you kind of have it all together, but not quite. A mid level manager or a senior manager can usually only stay in their role for two doubles of revenue. By the time they get to the third double, the company is too substantially different. So let's say you're running a 10 million dollar company and you're the head of marketing. You can probably do it at 20 million, 40 million, you're starting to stretch yourself. But by the time you get to 80 million, there's no way you can be the head of marketing. It's just too different. So if you're not scaling up your people by the time you're approaching that third double, you're going to be replacing them. So companies need to keep that in mind and kind of keep that as part of their strategic look on the people side of the business is what are our hiring needs going to be in a year, in two years, in three years? And if you're on a hypergrowth company, like, we doubled the revenue six years in a row, we had to be very cognizant of that because that was happening very quickly.
