Bad Bosses...

I watched an interesting article on CBC's Venture the other night about bad bosses. There was a quiz so I rated myself against each of the 7 questions, thinking back to various situations and issues I had to deal with when I had staff. Apparently, I suck. I put myself at about 4.5 out of 7 on the badness scale (which really means 5...) and the show said that from 3-6 is a bad boss and you should look for a new job (a 7 indicated the need to "run" from the job as fast as possible!). Wow, sorry to all my former staff!! Actually I don't think I was really that bad, but I really have to fight the urge to send the quiz link to my former staff members asking them to "rate" me...

There was also a short interview with Jack Welch in which he talked about creating a policy that the bottom 10% of staff should be pushed each year. This caught my eye since we are implementing a similar philosophy at our office. When I heard about it from the office, I got the definite impression that 5% of staff would be tagged as needing development, 5% as being in the wrong job, and 5% as under performing and needing to be "let go". Within this context I had trouble supporting the initiative since it does not allow for a team of high performing staff to remain intact and seems to arbitrarily undermine the self confidence of the whole group (ie. when will your number come up?!). But Jack Welch's approach is different: identify the bottom 10% and give them the feedback that they are not performing at the same level as their peers, and then coach them to either improve their skills or find another job within the company for which they are better suited - and highlight that if there is not improvement then "being let go is the final option". I think that being this straightforward with staff is a good thing. If my boss comes to me and says I am at the bottom of the pack - I need to improve my skills or find another job, or I'm gone - then I will definitely take the responsibility to do what I need to do to secure my future. Unfortunately what I usually see is that someone is targetted and they really don't have a chance to improve. In my past I had 2 "underperformers" that worked for me at different times. After working with one and not seeing much improvement I indicated that if things didn't improve I would have to initiate steps to have him let go - he found another job outside the company and left. HOWEVER he did keep in touch with me for a while after he left, which leads me to believe that he understood my situation and on some level appreciated the honesty. In the other situation I again worked with the team member and was able to stress that he did excellent work and was very intelligent - but didn't apply himself and was really letting down the whole team. In this case I was able to suggest and "push" him into another role within the company that would make better use of his skills while allowing me to hire in someone more intersted in doing the job that I needed done. This is the type of situation that I believe needs to exist. I believe that people need to know where they stand within the team - but in a positive way. There is nothing wrong with someone who is overwhelmed by their job and needs some support to get on top of things, or with someone who is not suited for the job they are in (which can often happen given all the re-orgs that happen these days), and who needs to know that they should be looking for something else if there isn't anything suitable within the immediate team. I believe that being honest with people is the best way to help them develop...

Anyway, I've gone way off topic and really started to ramble, so that's it for this post...