5 Ways to Bounce After a Management Mishap
June 25, 2008 by Phil Gerbyshak
Filed under guest posts, management
Guest post from Barry J. Moltz
I know a lot about management mishaps. After working for IBM for 10 years and then running three businesses of my own over the past 15 years, I have had my fair share of train wrecks both as a manager and employee. At IBM, they trained me as a classical manager with classes, simulations and 360 HR surveys. I felt fortunate to have that training when I started to manage my own businesses without the luxury of an HR department. I tried to learn from my experience at IBM where my manager used to have sales contests where first prize was lunch with him. (I asked, “What is second prize, two lunches with you?”).
Hiring the wrong person can be one of the biggest disasters for a company. I have hired and fired hundreds of people. I personally can remember being fired at least three times. Many of us have an urgent need to fill a position and we are too quick to hire anyone that looks like they would fit the position. We forget the most important HR adage, “Be Slow to Hire and Quick to Fire.”
Picture this: You woke up this morning and after one week with your new employee, you realize that you hired the wrong person. What do you do? How do you bounce from this type of mishap?
- Failure is an Option: It’s time to realize you screwed up. This is the wrong person for your company. The decision to hire this person is not going to look any better next week. You failed. Accept it.
- Face the Fear. Come into the office this morning and fire this person. It won’t be easy but you need to do it for the good of all the excellent employees in the company. It will be hard because you will feel partly responsible. You may have taken this person out of their previous job. They may have a family. You feel sick. You may have to go to the bathroom and throw up before you do this one.
- Give Up the Shame. We all make mistakes. This was not your first and it won’t be the last. Feel sorry for yourself. Throw a pity party. Learn what you can. Cheer the darkness but now let it go, Bounce! You can let go of this failure once you fired the person.
- Failure Gives Choices: You are now free to make another decision that will get a better person hired for your company. Maybe you need a different type of person than you originally thought for the job.
- Take Action: Go hire someone else, but maybe you need help this time. Ask for it!
How would you bounce from this disaster?
P.S.: Slacker Manager will be giving away a personally autographed copy of Barry’s latest book Bounce to 1 random commenter. All comments must be submitted on this post by Monday July 6th, 2008 to be entered in the random drawing. Don’t be shy, leave a comment below and YOU COULD WIN!
Barry Moltz has given hundreds of speeches to corporate, student, and entrepreneurial audiences of 20 to 20,000. He makes friends with his listeners and delivers the straight stuff in a direct, humorous, and occasionally irreverent manner using real life business examples and personal tales. He is the author of Bounce! The Path to True Business Confidence and You Need to Be a Little Crazy: The Truth About Starting and Growing Your Own Business. For more from Barry, check out his blog at http://barrymoltz.com/blog.
I’ve spent years convincing managers that hiring is their responsibility, that it’s a core competency and not one that can be left to HR or a headhunter. It’s also a learned skill—no one’s born with a hiring gene. In putting your number 5 into action, many managers manage to ignore the fact that 98% of the time if they had done their job correctly the mistake wouldn’t have happened in the first place.
But they’re too busy and only think about hiring when they have an opening and then they’re too busy to develop a full req, so they use a wreck, and hire the first person they like and if it doesn’t work they fire them and then do it all over again with the same system. (Remember Einstein’s definition of insanity?:)
In my previous life as an exec recruiter, I saw managers go through your five steps over and over until they happened to hire someone who worked out, while leaving a trail of carnage behind them. They did everything EXCEPT take the time to really learn how to hire. Just a note, but few companies have an HR organization comparable to IBM’s, so HR isn’t always the answer either.
PLEASE rewrite number 5 along the lines of, “Before you hire someone else learn how to do it right—write a viable req, really know what you need, don’t be blinded by charm, NEVER hire someone because you’re tired of interviewing and STOP thinking that the time spent interviewing is taking you away from your ‘real’ job. Hiring is second only to retaining your current people!”
I love your add to #5!
Great feedback Miki! Thanks for contributing greatly to the conversation.
I had heard the term “hire hard” which is in line to what you are saying.
I agree with Miki’s addition–the hiring process is almost certainly one of management’s biggest challenges. Besides having a competent core product or service, hiring the right people is the biggest factor in the success of a business.
I think Barry’s take, though, is spot on, in that too often it becomes painfully clear that a hire simply isn’t going to work out. And rather than nip a potential morale, security, or productivity problem in the bud, we’d rather try and let them “work it out,” with the end result usually being six to twelve months of frustration for not just the manager and employee, but an entire department.
As someone that has just recently moved into a senior management position, hiring and firing of employees has been one of the biggest things I’ve had to get a grasp of quickly. For example, I have hired 4 people in the past 2 months and fired 1 person. The firing was difficult to me, since all my staff members are also ‘friends’. The company is very small and very close knit and I have a great rapport with all my staff since I started from the Tier 1 position and moved up quickly to the new position of Customer Support Manager.
The person I was tasked with letting go right after I took over, was someone I had sat in on the interview and my opinion drove the decision on hiring or not. Unfortunately, the new hire ‘talked the talk’ and had a very good interview with all the correct answers. Sadly they could not ‘walk the walk’ and just drove down the productivity of the entire support staff once put on the floor after training. I guess what I experienced was all of the steps. I faced the fact that I screwed up and hired the wrong person, I knew they were bringing down the numbers for not just my people but making my supervisors and me look bad to the director of operations for the company. It was one of those moments in life where you just have to suck it up and do what needs to be done. As Barry pointed out, they could have had a family or they could have relocated for the job, luckily this person was not in that category. It was a situation where I had to take the bull by the horns, break the bad news and send them on their way. Have to say I did feel bad doing it, since I have been on the other side of the desk before and know ‘the look’ that the manager gets right before telling you ‘good luck in your next job’. But it didn’t last long, it was done and over with and after another 5 interviews, found another person to fill their shoes, that happens to be about 3 times more productive then some of my other staff members. So, it turned out well for the company and me in the end.
Hi Chuck, I’m glad that your second hire worked out. What I’m wondering is if you took the time to go back over the first hire’s interviews and identify what could have been done or handled differently that would have prevented the offer.
There are many ways between the interviews and reference checks to spot someone who doesn’t walk their talk.
If an analysis isn’t done, then whatever happened is likely to happen again.
Unfortunately, at that point Miki I don’t know how far we were actually going to look into that persons references.
Being a growing company and having someone show up from not so much a competitor but from a company that does the same thing as us, the candidate looked to good to pass up. At the time I was the one in charge of the ‘tech’ side of things and out of the 20 some odd questions I asked them, they came back with exactly what I wanted to hear or something that was close and coachable.
In hindsight, we should have done a reference check to see why they left their last employer and if they were re-hireable there or not. Luckily we are not at a point where background checks are needed, but as we grow I can see this eventually becoming something we might have to look into making part of the interview process.
Having done about 15 interviews since then at this point, I know I’m far from a seasoned vet. But I have got a pretty good grasp as far as what I’m looking for in either a Tier 1 or Tier 2 rep and also who will fit well with the current group of employees.
Chuck, being a startup or small biz is no reason to skip reference checks, which are a totally different animal than background checks.
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