Basically, I am a trusting soul. I look for the best in people and often find it. When I see someone struggling with their career I try to help them out. If an employee is not performing to a reasonable level of expectation, I first ask if they have received the right training…. have we made it clear exactly what is expected? Have we provided the employee with the tools to do
the job? Have we provided positive feedback and supported growth and change? These, I believe are some of the
responsibilities we have as good employers.
But even when we have done everything right and made every effort to help someone, it is still possible that we have hired the wrong person for the job. Or perhaps we were simply wrong in our assess
ment when we brought them on board or promoted them. In these cases, we need to act quickly and decisively and either put them into the “right” position with our company or set them free to find the right position in a different company.
One of th
e toughest issues we face as managers and leaders is when a key employee screws up big time. It doesn’t happen often but it does happen. Let me share a quick story. My young company was in a rapid growth mode. We were profitable and expanding at a rate of 20-30% per year and our General Bookkeeper and staff of four were ove
rwhelmed. I decided it was time to bring in a CFO or VP of Finance. I wanted a thought partner who could do more than make sure our books were ready for the accountant. I wanted someone who could manage our investments and help me with strategies to grow the revenue in the business and eliminate the pockets
of waste. The search was on.
Over three to four months I conducted a high level search. It started with researching exactly what I should be looking for and expecting
from a candidate. I surveyed all of the CEO’s in my network to put together a tight job description that was perfectly tailored to our needs. Then, I turned the search over to an experienced head hunter who came highly recommended and who secured a number of prospects and set some preliminary appointments for interviews. It was an exhausting process and after several months one gentlemen stood out. He was highly qualified and shared our c
orporate values. Had a great work ethic and wonderful references. So, after some negotiation, we hired George at a price that was a little painful but with big hopes.
Our largest client in those days was extremely demanding and required us to jump through hoops when it came to billing and accounting. I won’t bore you with details but will say that one of George’s primary tasks was to automate this particular client’s billing which had historically been a manual, tedious and time consuming affair. George jumped on this project with zest. He was first in the office and among the last to leave. He was quickly surrou
nded with stacks of paper on his desk and the bookkeeping team seemed to turn to him with their questions. This was going to be great… even at the extra expense I had committed to.
It took about three months (an embarrassingly long time in retrospect) to realize that while George was immersed in this project no
one was billing this particular client. With a solution always just a “few days away”, everyone was letting the invoicing sit there, growing stale. This amounted to about $150,000 or more per month. Thankfully we were doing so well at the time that I didn’t pick it up
. Unfortunately, my systems weren’t strong enough to alert me. In any event, it lead to a very unpleasant meeting with George when I had to confront him about close to half a million dollars in billing that was sitting in cartons in accounting awaiting his direction. You just can’t make this stuff up!
I also learned that while George was the first one in each morning it wasn’t
because he was hard at work. Oh no, it was because he loved to read the NY Times all the way through without interruption. So his 7:30AM arrivals were really his time to sort out his day while he had his toasted bagel and coffee and read his paper. And his “burning the midnight oil” was actually a mean game of solitaire that he was playing on his computer! If I knew then what I know today, I would have licked my wounds and sent George packing. But because this was the first mistake (and a big one at that), I employed a technique that I had used successfully in the past: the critical incident report.
The Critical Incident Report (CIR) also known as Critical Incident Technique (CIT) is widely used in academics and industry. Its roots come from the Air Force and work with behavioral psychologists. When someone like George has had a serious screw up (think of two pilots who nearly collide at high speed at great altitude), the participant is asked to write up a report that documents all events leading up to the incident and his thinking at that time. The participants provide a chronology, his or her observations of the environment, identifies external forces that impacted his thinking and so on. Ultimately, the individual must commit to writing what he learned and how he would react in the future under similar conditions.
George learned from the CIR and we reviewed it in great detail. He did such a good job that it saved his job and he never made that kind of mistake again. Unfortunately, it didn’t stop him when, a year later, he made another huge mistake in a completely different area. I will never know, but with hindsight, it may have been smarter to have fired him at the time of the first incident!
