Conscious Leadership – Harboring Under-Performers

Conscious Leadership Scenario:

We witness harboring under-performers all around; from the Executive Teams, to C-suite leadership, all the way to the Board Room. The threshold for uncertainty varies from company to company, but always has a negative impact. It’s always interesting to see how long it plays out. 

Leadership Fail:

Once Senior Executives start to recognize a team or a team member lagging, struggling with culture or goals, or lacking in engagement, immediate action is required. Reguluary, the situation is ignored with a strong hope that it resolves itself. This lack of acknowledgement only makes a deeper hole to climb out of. It’s could potentially cost you your job or more importantly, your brand and name in the industry.

Negative Affect on Culture and Organizational Performance: 

There are a plethora of adverse effects harboring an under-performer can have on an organization. Keeping poor-performers around, though, is both a huge time suck for management but also a profit-killer for your business. 

1) Employee Morale: Poor employees can create a ripple effect throughout the entire workplace. Just one under-performer can decrease employee morale significantly and spread apprehension and anger throughout the workplace. Ultimately, this can lead to your top performers looking for employment elsewhere and reduce your employee retention rate.

2) Customer Service Quality: If your poor-performers have direct contact with your customers, this problem could be dramatic. Today, just one bad experience with a customer could be recounted to hundreds or thousands of other customers instantly. This could spur a wave of customer relations problems.

3)  Company Profits – The bottom line is that poor performers cost your company money. Not only is their productivity level lowered, but their bad behavior could directly affect the production level of those working around them. In addition, supervisors have to spend valuable time overseeing the bad employees, correcting mistakes, or trying to boost the morale of the other workers.

Conscious Leadership Solution:

Option 1) A conscious step by Senior Executives to determine if the person is in the right position or role. This benchmarking is achieved through a DISC/Driving Forces/EQ assessment.

Option 2) Accurately judge and manage your selection process when hiring new team members. This high touch level of accuracy can only be achieved through predictive EQ/IQ assessments-taking all the ambiguity out of the hiring process. 

Option 3) Senior Executive Mentoring: this can only be achieved with face to face meetings. 

1st Meeting: Am I providing you with all the tools, team, and mentoring to ensure your success?

2nd Meeting: (30 days later) Are we seeing momentum, an improvement on set goals, and expectations? Team thoughts and individual improvement?

3rd Meeting: (30 days later) You see additional improvement, and you continue to work with the team member. Or you do not see improvement, and it’s time to make a leadership change. 

So, at Thomas & Taylor Partners, we are here to help. For us, our purpose is leadership for a better world and we are here to help you in showing up as the leader you need to be. We are here to support you globally. We are on this journey together. This is an invitation, an invitation to join us in creating a collaborative movement: the movement of conscious leadership for a better world.

Live2Lead,

Travis