MBA1876 How To Address Poor Performance From a Team Member

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Hey O. Welcome to the $100M. You don't need to build your business alone. We got your back every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar is at home. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And in today's lesson you will learn how to address poor performance from a team member. As your business starts to grow, you're going to make some hires. And for the time being, we are hiring human beings. The robots haven't arrived yet and human beings are just not perfect. There will be miscommunication, there'll be misunderstandings. Your team member might struggle, might just be having a tough day, or even might be taking advantage. These things will happen. They're out of your control. What's in your control is how you address these issues. If somebody on your team is not doing something correctly or is underperforming and you don't do anything about it, that means it's okay, that performance is fine. Nothing was said that means it's fine. So in today's episode, I'm going to give you my advice from my own experiences in business. What works when it comes to addressing poor performance from a team member? Of course there's going to be different variables and different situations that you're going to handle. But my advice today is going to help you know how to navigate through it, how to make sure you're being fair, but at the same time doing what's best for your business. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With usaa you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a'@usaa.com bundle restrictions apply. In my experience of over 20 years running businesses, when a team member, when I hire, when one of your employees does something that is not up to your standard is considered poor performance, nine times out of 10, it's unintentional. And I'll explain what I mean by unintentional. Unintentional means that it's just either a pure mistake, an oversight. They just didn't think about something in the right way. Maybe there was a miscommunication. Maybe they didn't fully understand the instructions you gave them. Maybe they were too shy to ask questions. Maybe they're new and they're intimidated by you or their boss. And the reason why I start with this is because most of the time, people don't mean to make a mistake. People don't mean to underperform. Our jobs as leaders in our business is to give them the support to be able to bounce back and do things properly. This is a relationship you have with your team members, with your employees. You can't just expect them to do things perfectly. From the moment you hire them, they're going to make mistakes. They're going to do things less than your expectations. Your job is to make sure you correct them along the way. And we'll talk about, just in time, corrections. It's imperative for you to do this. Before I get into that, I said nine times out of 10, 10% of the time, I know that seems like a lot, but in my experience, one out of 10 times, it has nothing to do with anything I just mentioned. This one is on the team member. They could be taking advantage. They could be getting lazy, they could be distracted. They could be dealing with something else in their life that is preventing them to have their full focus. Now, the reason why I put this into different categories, because you can provide all the resources and all the guidance and all the training and all the support. But if other things are happening, if there are other things going on, even just pure negligence and somebody just taking advantage of the situation or your kindness, there's nothing you can really do that's kind of out of your control. And it's your job to be able to identify that. Because rarely I said, you know, 10% of the time, you're going to have to address these issues or poor performance in a different way. You're going to have to be a little bit more stern and really let them know that this is not acceptable. And if this continues, this is what's going to happen. You got to just be flat out honest. With them, hey, you're making this mistake or you're doing this incorrectly. We've trained you. We've talked about this several times. I've given you resources. You told me that it's all clear. Your teammates have helped you, and yet you're still doing it incorrectly or you're still not doing at the level that we expect. This leads me to believe there's something else going on that is distracting you. And 100% of the time, when I actually say these words to them, they just fold. They just basically spill the beans and say, you're right, this is my fault. I am distracted. This is what's going on. And they just kind of just unload why they are performing this way. And it has nothing to do with you. Has a lot to do with their personal situation. Now, as entrepreneurs, as business owners, you have a couple of responsibilities you have to balance. One, you have the responsibility of the hire the person you hired your employee. You want to make sure you support them as much as possible. And that's why when I'm in this situation where we've identified, hey, this is not anybody on the team's fault. We've given you all the support. You're dropping the ball either intentionally or unintentionally because you're just distracted dealing with something else. Whatever it is, at this moment, when we identify, we say, okay, is there a way I can help? Do you need some time off? This is what I actually do, actually offer some solutions. Hey, do you need some time off to deal with whatever you're dealing with? Because the way you're performing right now can't continue. So we got to change something. And this is something you have to make clear, like, hey, what is happening now is unacceptable. We're not going to continue doing this, because if we're going to continue to do this, we're going to get the same results. So we're going to have to change what we're doing. Okay, so do you need some time off to sort out what you have to sort out? Are there any ways I could support you to solve this? I want to support them as much as possible because at the end of the day, they're an investment I want to keep. I want to make sure that we try to get them back into the fold and get them focused up and hopefully they can solve it. And I have to say, in the moments in the experiences I've had in this type of situation, a few times, we were able to turn things around, and that team member stayed with us. It took some time to sort out what they needed to do and they came back fully focused and everything was fine. I say a few times, but in my experience, most of the time in this type of situation, it's hard to reverse, it's hard to actually salvage the situation. And it's really just prolonging the inevitable. Why? Because you're in the situation for a reason. Everybody's got problems. Everybody's got things going on in their life. Everybody's got stresses, everybody has distractions. Everybody's got things going on. Some people know to handle that better than others. And I'm not trying to be insensitive here. We all have certain situations that are just really, really tough to deal with. And you need time off or you need a break, and that's fine. But some people just don't know how to handle situations like that. And when push comes to shove, what suffers is the work, their job. Some people, when they have something going on in their life or something that is stopping them from performing, they go full into the work, they dive into it and they just actually just find comfort in something they can control. But you have to realize you're not gonna be able to solve all problems. Not everybody's gonna be meant to work for you. Sometimes you're gonna have to let them go. Maybe you gotta just say, hey, this is not a good fit. And you can give them a few chances. You can give them, of course, a few options to salvage the situation. But you're in your rights to say this is not a good fit. Why do I say that? Because I said you have two responsibilities and I said one of them is to the employee. But the other responsibility you have is towards your business and your customers. As a business owner, it's not about you anymore, okay? It's not about what works for you and your business and your product and having this bustling, well oiled machine. It's actually about the customers, okay? You owe it to the customer. They're paying you money for a product or service at a certain standard. And if for some reason somebody on the team is not contributing to that standard. Standard, it's your responsibility. The customers are paying you because you're the leader to make the right decision to do what's best for them. That's just what a business is. That's what you signed up for. And we have to face that reality. We have to face the reality that we have responsibilities towards our team, but we also have responsibilities towards our customers. Because without serving our customers and supplying them with the Product and service that they're paying for and what they want and exceeding their expectations and really making sure you deliver on those expectations. Without that, you can't pay any employees. Right? You don't have a company. So this is what's tough about being an entrepreneur, is that you gotta make these tough decisions and understand you have a balance of responsibilities. Now that we talked about that one out of 10 times where it's a difficult situation and you can't really change things. Nine out of 10 times, it's something that you can train. It's something that they just innocently made a mistake. Right now, your job, the most critical thing you need to do as a leader of your business, whether it's you who does this or you instill this in your culture, so your managers do this is just in time. Correction. If something is happening in your business, if somebody on your team does something incorrectly or not up to standard or it's just a little bit off, the mark is not on brand. Don't wait in the moment, you have to correct them. You have to train them. See it as a teaching moment. As many of you know, I was a teacher for over 13 years in the classroom and I would not leave a student hanging. I wouldn't let a student do a mistake when I'm teaching them something and let them just continue to do that mistake. I need to correct it before it becomes a compounded issue. So as soon as you see something that's just not right, it's your responsibility to have a chat with that person. Hey, I noticed that you wrote to the customer in this way. Love the effort, and this part is great. But one thing that I would love for you to do to improve is to correct X, Y, Z in the future. Can you make sure you do that? And that's a good way to approach it. Now I like to take it one step further and say, great. How are you going to remember to do this the next time around? You know, I want to empower them. I want to say, hey, you know, throw the responsibility in their plate. Because it's not just enough to teach them something, they have to remember to do it in the time they need to do it. So they might say, oh, I'm going to create a sop or I'm going to create a response that I can refer to when I have this situation again. I'm going to add it to our training manual so that I can search for it the next time I have this problem. So make sure you do this. Now. One of the Things I learned from Derek Sivers in his book Anyone Can Do It. He used to do this in his company cd, baby. It's a little bit tiring and time consuming, but it works and it's great for the long term results of your business. What is this? Well, when somebody has a question, when somebody's doing something incorrectly, when somebody's doing something in the proper way, you don't need to call that person out, but you need to bring up that issue for publicly to everybody. You could say, hey, I've noticed that this is happening and you don't have to name names or anything like that. And what you do is you say, this is what we're going to do, this is the right way to do it and we're going to document it. And I learned this from Derek. They had like this sop, the standard Operating Procedure binder, where they just added to the binder every time somebody had a question or somebody was doing something incorrectly, they just wrote it inside the doc that was a physical binder. But for us it's just a Google Doc where we have all our SOPs for every department. So in that moment, this could be asynchronous. It could just be a message in your Slack channel or however you communicate with your team in person or on video calls. You say, who wants to add it to the book? Somebody on the team can do it. Anybody, not you, because they need to learn how to write things themselves in the SOP manual. Now, the reason why we do this is because you don't want to repeat yourself. If somebody asks you the question, hey, how do we do so and so, and they've already has this question or somebody else asked this question, you could say, have you checked the SOP manual? And you know the answer is no, because it would be in there. But they have a frame of reference and they get the habit of checking the manual. And of course new problems will arise. This allows you to crowdsource the training and spread the responsibility of improvement with everybody. Now, in addition to all this, you want to have regular evaluations for your team members. We feel like it's really critical the first year a team member's with us. So we have a quarterly evaluation every three months with a new hire in their first year. After the first year, it's an annual review because if you passed your first year, that means you're solid and you get it. And if we haven't ironed everything out in that first year, in those four quarterly reviews, that probably means we're not A good fit. And we'll part ways now in these annual reviews, we have basically a Google form that they fill out, the employee fills out, and then they're evaluated by their supervisor. And all these questions in the form are aligned with their KPIs or key performance indicators for their job role. That way they know they're going to be evaluated. They know what they're going to be evaluated on. They know how to perform well. One of the things that you can do as a favor to all your employees and a favor to yourself so they're all performing the way you want them to perform is to tell them what winning looks like, what do they have to do to do well at the job. And that's where KPIs come from and that's where those evaluations form come from. And when you evaluate them regularly, they're on top of their game. They know what they need to improve because the next time they be evaluated, they know that you're going to be asking questions about, hey, have you improved the things that you're trying to work on your shortcomings.

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To wrap up today's lesson on addressing poor performance from a team member, remember, just in time. Correction is important. Making sure you document those corrections and how to do things properly so they can always go back to the sop. Regular evaluations and one on one talks really help. But there's one more thing I want to point out. Sometimes the reason why they're not performing well is your fault. It's on you. And what do I mean by that? Well, sometimes they're hired in a position that they're not really best suited for. Their strengths are not really being utilized in the position you hired them for. And that just means you hired the wrong person for that job. It doesn't mean they won't work out in your company. I found that sometimes when you challenge your team members to do different things in their roles, you realize, well, that person's actually pretty good at this. An example of this is we had a very good customer service agent, but I felt like he was not being challenged enough. We realized he's actually pretty good at testing the software and finding bugs and identifying issues. So when we opened up the role for a QA engineer, we interviewed him in that interview process and we realized wow. This is actually a better role for him. He is actually going to exceed his current level of performance in this new role and it's been a few months now and he's proven that. So sometimes people are better suited. It's not that they stink or something at one job. No. I'm just saying sometimes they're just going to be better somewhere else in your company. Keep those options open and keep your eyes peeled for what they do and where they actually shine in different areas of their job. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love this show, if you love this episode, the best way to get more is to hit subscribe on your favorite podcast app. By doing so, you get the next episode automatically. You also get access to over 1800 episodes in our archives. It's the only way to get access. It's absolutely free. And then you can go back in our back catalog and listen to all our lessons. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I said that employees are an investment. It's actually quite costly in terms of time and money and effort and resources to hire a new person. It's really actually a big headache. I actually don't like going through that process. This is why a lot of companies that grow very fast implode because they're forced to hire a whole bunch of people quickly. And because they have to do it quickly, they don't make the right choices. And those people actually don't do the jobs they need to do. So it's better for you to make the effort to salvage an employee that's not doing so well, to correct them, to help them, to train them, than to try and hire somebody new. They already know your culture. They know your SOPs. They've been trained. They get it right. Having said that, in my experience, one out of 10 times, they're just not going to be a good fit. And it's the best move for you and the team member to say, you know what? I think we have to say goodbye. And that's okay. Not everybody is going to be perfect for your business. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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