Chad Silverstein reflects on his leadership journey, contrasting being "tender" versus "tough." He explains how, with a coach's help, he learned to have difficult performance conversations, hold employees accountable, and adopt the discipline of "hire slow and fire fast," arguing that timely corrective actions improve company culture and performance.
Chapters
So a leadership dilemma that I used to deal with on a monthly basis at my office was just leading employees and having people that I was not being tougher with. We would say that we have leaders that are tough and we have leaders that are tender. And I was on the tender side. It was hard for me to be tough. And my coach used to say to me, it's better to be tender and have to learn how to get tough than to be tough and have to try to become tender. So I took that as a challenge that I'm going to become tougher. And he helped me through that. And what that meant was, is that when someone was not performing, I had to hold them accountable. When someone needed to be addressed about something, I didn't shy away from it. So I used to look for conversations. I used to mine for the issues, and then I would bubble them up and I would go have those hard conversations. And those were conversations that I typically would always try to avoid. I think most people do because they're scared. They're scared of conflict. It's easier to not have the conversation. But I learned it's just a conversation to be had. And a lot of times, it may be really hard to tell someone that you care about the truth, even if it's just your truth. But you owe it to people to do that, because if you talk to any leader, they're all going to say, I wish people would tell me the truth. I wish they'd give me feedback. I wish I knew what they were thinking. And I used to beg my employees, you know, for feedback, and they were too scared to give it to me. They didn't. You know, when you hold the power to control someone's employment or you pay them, the relationships are going to be different. And that's why when the boss walks into the room, I don't care who they are, changes the dynamics of the room. People are going to be a little bit more careful, and you can drop down those barriers by building trust, but they're still an authority figure, and it's just the way it works. And I avoided a lot of conversations early on that meant that I had a lot of people in my office that were hanging around a little bit too long. And, you know, the problem is that when you do that as a leader, everyone else in the office, it drives them nuts. They can't believe that this person is still on the team. They're wondering, what took you so long? And I had enough of people telling me that. And deep down inside, you know, when someone's not a good fit, but because you pour so much into it and you pay all this money and you want to see them work out and the thought of cutting them loose is just terrible, having to start over. But you gotta hire slow and fire fast. And once you can adopt that discipline and have those conversations early and often and make changes swiftly after you give people a chance to improve, your entire culture not only appreciates it, but it makes it a more of a high performing culture. So I wouldn't have been able to do that without a coach. There's no way that I would have been able to do that on my own. And I think as you build the muscle to have more and more of these hard conversations, you build these reps, it becomes easier and easier to the point where it's just like getting out of bed. You have a hard conversation with people. So I had plenty of hard conversations with people. And as my company grew, I had to have more of them. And, you know, it was always a tough thing, especially when I was really close with the person.
