The Metiss Group's Blog

If your company is growing, the complexity of the jobs in your company is growing.  If your employees are not growing at a faster rate, the jobs will outgrow them.  This doesn’t mean those employees are bad.  It just means that as jobs become larger and more complex, some individuals won’t be able to keep up.

One of the biggest mistakes a leader can make is knowing that an employee cannot be successful in his or her current job and not doing anything about it.  This doesn’t necessarily mean letting them go.  It’s possible to find another “seat on the bus” for the individual where he or she might be able to succeed.  Though it makes you feel better, there is almost no return on investment in spending time trying to fix poor performers in a role that has outgrown them.

The worst scenario is when a leader knows the individual won’t succeed, but justifies keeping the person on, thinking it’s better to have someone, anyone, in the position than having no one at all.

Keeping under performers around means a leader is sending the message to everyone on the team that he or she either doesn’t recognize the problem, or is afraid to deal with it. Either way, it sends a message of weakness that every employee can see.

Empower yourself to move employees in jobs that have outgrown them and you’ll be more successful.

This entry was posted on September 19, 2014 at 1:51 pm and is filed under Leadership. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.