Three Outcomes – Terrible to Great. How To Get The Best One
You have a worst team member
They might be a little bit behind, a bit slower, make a few more mistakes …. all the way through to being very disruptive in the team, creating a lot of angry and frustration in the team, a serious underperformer or worse.
Your worst team member DAMAGES team performance. It might be a bit or it might be a lot.
If it is only a bit now, 9 out of 10 times, that damage will grow over time. Usually slowly. Sometimes fast. The negative impact on the team nearly always grows and it usually spreads.
Human nature, the desire for fairness, group dynamics, and taking the easiest route all contribute to the problems getting worse over time.
The Costs To You
Dropping or stagnant team performance COSTS YOU:
- Influence within the business
- Reduces your impact
- Gives you a smaller or no bonus
- Reduces your pay rise
- Slows down or stops your promotion
- Reduces your team’s respect for you
- Damages your authority as a manager
- Reduces standards and team culture
- Can easily endanger your job security as a manager (particularly if the problems are visible)
Dropping or stagnant team performance also COSTS YOUR BUSINESS plenty:
- Small drops in performance, even for small teams (<10), often costs the business tens of £’000s EACH YEAR
- Causes disruption and lower teamwork between teams
- Adds pressure and stress to your boss and business leadership team
- Increases the pressure and workload of other teams in the business (to maintain business performance)
- Very worst case – can contribute to businesses failing (I have seen this almost happen!)
Bosses are not able to put up with these problems for long. The cost is simply too great. Bosses have to resolve the problems quickly and one of the most practical options is to REPLACE THE TEAM MANAGER. You can lose your job, sometimes quickly.
Take Action
For all these reasons, it is vital that you PREVENT the problems get worse and spreading. This requires specific action on your part.
There are lot of reasons why managers don’t take action. Some of the common ones include:
- The problems seem pretty minor, and it doesn’t feel worth taking the risk of potentially damaging relationships over
- The worst team member has many redeeming qualities or you like them as a person, so put off having any corrective conversations.
- They are popular in the team so you don’t want to upset them or have them turn against you (or turn the team against you).
- You hope they problems will sort themselves out. It feels heavy handed or even micromanaging to take action.
- You don’t know what to say or do.
The list could go on.
The WORST OUTCOME, that managers MUST AVOID is not taking any action.
Taking action, even bad action, will communicate a strong message to your worst team member and the REST of the team – this level of performance and/or behaviour is not acceptable.
This message is VERY IMPORTANT to prevent the issues getting worse or spreading.
The Outcomes You Must Get
To be certain of maintain team performance and certainly if you want to improve team performance, you must get ONE of two outcomes when faced with any people problems in your team:
- You must IMPROVE them i.e. their performance or behaviour improves to at least the average of the team
- OR you must REMOVE the person from your team (move them to a more suitable role or remove them from the company)
You have to get one of these outcomes to improve team performance.
Removing Team Members Is Risky
Removing team members from the team (and company) carries significant risk to damaging team performance. If you lose the trust of your team, team performance is likely to drop.
If team members feel unsafe (i.e. they could be removed quickly and without warning), team performance will drop.
When team members lose trust and feel unsafe, they spend a lot more time protecting their jobs and protecting their position. This is time and effort they are not spending pushing the team forwards and towards targets. Team members also take less risks, make less decisions, and develop skills more slowly – which leads to slower working habits and lower performance. Team performance will drop as a result.
All these risks are worth taking if you are not able to improve your team member. In fact there is a lot you can do before removing an individual that will reduce the risk of damaging team performance considerably.
Improving Your Worst Team Member
This is by far the best option for everyone – you, the team, the business and your worst team member.
Improving is months quicker than removing.
Improvement safeguards trust and team safety. In my experience, when done well, improving INCREASES team trust and psychological safety, often by quite a bit.
Improving guarantees team performance will improve by a lot more than one person’s contribution.
Improvement takes a bit more management skill than removing. In fact, improvement requires you to undertake a set of INTERDEPENDENT actions. Miss one or more, or don’t do them well enough, and your ability to improve drops considerably.
When you know what to do, and you have reasonable people skills, you can get improvement quickly and relatively painlessly.
Join our Webinar
To help you improve your worst team member as quickly and easily as practical, I invite you to join our FREE Webinar teaching you a lot about how to get improvement from ANY team member.
Click the button below to find out how this webinar will help you:
- Gain the TOOLS most managers don’t have
- Quickly regain CONTROL of your situation
- Transform from reacting to taking PROACTIVE effective steps to create improvement
- Understand the 6 main barriers PREVENTING improvement and what is needed to overcome these barriers
- Tells you how to boost your AUTHORITY with your worst team member
- Explains how to break the downward cycle of escalating fear and insecurity for you and your worst team member
- Increases your confidence and expertise to RESOLVE people problems in teams and reduce future problems occurring
- Helps you PERSUADE bosses and HR to give you permission to take formal action (which increases the pressure for improvement)
Click Here to register and join this webinar on How to Quickly and Easily Improve Your Worst Team Member.
