No recruitment process is perfect. I don’t care what analytics are used, or what screening is performed – there is no process that is 100% certain when it comes to choosing people for your team. If there was, we would all be using it, no one would ever get fired and everyone would stay in their jobs throughout their entire careers. Sometimes it is merely due to timing: did the person get promoted too fast (not enough skills) or too slowly (skills not kept up to date). Sometimes the job was not well defined or with the skills that are really needed to be successful. Sometimes the fit for the team or the culture isn’t appropriate. Sometimes there is no career progression that is appropriate for the team member once they get into position. So there will be people on your team at one point in time or another that just don’t fit.
Recently, I was watching a basketball game while lamenting an employee who was on my own team at work. My team on the basketball court wasn’t winning and so my mind was left to wander a bit. I thought about the great guy at work with an amazing work ethic who put 150% effort into everything he did but wasn’t getting the job done. No matter how much time we put into training, both formally and informally, he wasn’t making the right decisions, the ones in line with our culture, on his own.
I was startled back into focusing on the basketball game when the men next to me started yelling at the coach.
“Take him (we’ll call him Curtis) out!”
I looked back at the game. Sure enough, Curtis was taking shots but not sinking them. Curtis seemed to be running faster and trying harder than anyone else on the team, just not making the contribution to win. Instead of watching for scoring, I started watching the team dynamics.
They weren’t moving the ball around the team as they should. The team must have sensed that Curtis wasn’t up to their level and they weren’t passing to him. That made the remaining players work that much harder, and they were beginning to tire out because they were making up for Curtis’s deficits. When they did send the ball to Curtis, inevitably he would miss the shot, or the ball would be stolen away resulting in a basket for the other team. The look on Curtis’s face revealed sheer disappointment. Regardless, he kept on trying with all his might. I caught the other players looking at the coach with disdain.
The game ended with the defeat of our basketball team and some realizations for my own team at work:
- Heartbreaking as it is, trying hard isn’t enough. You have to have the skills to contribute to the team. If you take 40 shots a game, but none of them sink, it didn’t help the team win.
- When someone isn’t contributing to the team appropriately, others have to make up for it and it wears them out. It puts undue demands on the best players.
- The other players look to the coach to make the tough call and pull the poor player out. No one else can do it, that’s the coach’s job and if s/he doesn’t do it, then s/he is doing a disservice to the entire team.
- Not doing his/her job makes the other players lose respect for the coach and all the other instructions that are given during the game. Telling the good players to play harder to win isn’t received well.
- The other players start to resent the poor performer.
- No one wants to be on a losing team, not even Curtis.
- Good players will have the opportunity to leave, bad players stay (no one else wants them), or they are too afraid of failing elsewhere to move on. So the coach has to do something to keep the good players, and help the poor player find a different team with a need for his/her skill set.
Don’t leave this article thinking that the ax is the best solution for poor team dynamics. Coaching to make every player successful should always be attempted first. But, when that isn’t working, then it is up to the coach, and no one else, to make the tough call to pull a player out. It is especially difficult when that player tries so hard to help the team win.
In my case, I had tough conversations with my team member. We discussed fit and the basketball analogy specifically. Eventually, he decided to leave. He was a solid player, but not a good fit for us, and sure enough he found another team to play on a couple of weeks later. The position was a much better fit for him, and put him again in a position to win.
Armed with some new learnings about what it takes to be successful on our team, we started drafting for a new player. A new team player joined us shortly thereafter and we went to work figuring out the new team dynamics. Everyone was in position, excited again and working for a win.
