Addition by Subtraction

By Jim Champagne

I read an article this week titled “The Secret to Having Happy Employees”. I began reading expecting the standard message about how to treat your employees well and they will flourish. While treating your employees well is a part of the big picture to a happy workforce, it’s not then entire story. The article goes on to describe what one manager did to make his employees happy. He said “I fired the unhappy ones”. While that may shock some people, it sometimes has its place.

I can relate to this article as it happened almost the exact same way when I took on my first real management role. When I first took over the group I met with all of my new team and talked openly about my goals and listened to their concerns, frustrations and hopes for the group. I heard a similar theme from many of the people in the group in that one particular person was not pulling their own weight and it was dragging everyone down. While that was far from being the only problem, it was certainly high on everyone’s mind. I went about trying to identify everyone’s strengths and put the one person everyone was complaining about in a role they said would allow them to do their best work. It didn’t work! I tried giving this person a couple other jobs, but none of them worked out either. I finally came to the conclusion that this person was in the wrong job at the wrong company and that nothing I could do would make them happy. Shortly thereafter I spoke to the person and offered to help them find another job and let them go. The group immediately realized I was listening to them and that I cared about building a team of high performing people. After that they really began to gel as a team.

This taught me a valuable lesson about building teams. As with any professional sports team where one negative person can have a destructive impact on the cohesion of the group, the same negative impact can happen with any company.

Assessment tools can really help you understand peoples talents and can be a key piece to building high performing teams.