Edition 20 - Seeing the deadwood from the trees.

Hey folks,

Sorry to have missed you for a couple of weeks. It’s busy at 11:HQ, and with so many great things happening around the business, my sleeves are up! Just the way I like it, to be honest, but it kind of limits my time to sit and ponder something on my list.?

This week though, it made itself into the diary, and here we are again - Thanks, Daisy!?

In this edition I’m going to talk a little about something that many companies have to face into as they scale, and that’s raising the bar on performance and managing those who no longer deliver the impact you need to grow and be successful. I think most companies find this challenging and today I want to share with you our approach here at 11:FS.?

Caveat, we are by no means perfect at this, but I think we do a pretty good job. Unfortunately though most organisations are spectacularly terrible at this in reality.

Let's Double-click. ????????????

Deadwood?

Deadwood? ???

I’m not talking about that 2004 series with Lovejoy in it but the phenomena of having “organisational drag through people or things that are no longer useful or productive”.?

This can happen for multiple reasons; people's circumstances change, growth in the business, change of business priorities, the inability of individuals to sustain performance and many other things. But, as my son parroted back to me driving back from a football game on Sunday this week, “these are all reasons, but they are not excuses, daddy”. Burn Josh, burn.

Deadwood, I think, is one of the most significant issues in any organisation. I once wrote a blog in 2010 where I estimated that in most corporations, at least 30% of people are no longer helpful or productive. Sadly though, due to sh!tty performance management, businesses find it hard to figure out which 30%!

The knock-on impact of this is catastrophic for a business’s performance and mortality more broadly.

The impact of deadwood.

So why does this matter? What impact does having zombie employees around a business have?

While there are many symptoms, they are most felt IMHO in the following areas:?

• Communication becomes strained - As the number of employees in a business grows communication naturally moves further and further away from the source. With the wrong people, who no longer add value and who lack passion at critical layers, business communications doesn't end up reaching the front line.
• Your business performance is impacted - All of the above means your business is sub optimal, and the size of your business will determine whether you feel that quickly or slowly over time. Either way, you won't be doing whatever it is you do as well as you could be, and inevitably you won't be achieving your goals.
• You lose talent - People come and go at organisations, and this will always be so, but you will start to lose people you don't want to lose if this problem isn’t addressed quickly. The starting point for figuring this out is to determine who in your team is a “hell yes”. Figure out who you would shed a tear for if you lost them, and those you wouldn't.

All these headlines are not ideal. What’s hard is that corporate organisations are incredibly poor at diagnosing this, and even worse at enacting any resolution in any meaningful timescale.?

As I said before, 11:FS is by no means perfect at this (yet!) but we’ve set out a few things over the years which I believe have kept us razor focussed when it comes to our people.

Diagnosing deadwood in 3 easy steps.

You’ve got to this point in this blog. Well done. Now you are all like, “well, what does my company do about this?” right??

1 - Set your sieve - First, you need a framework. You need the magical sieve that separates out those people who are still “your people'' and those who are “not”. This really allows you and those who operate your business to know which fish to keep and which need a little more time in the sea. For us, at 11:FS these are our values and attributes that we think determine our types of people and also create the environment that best allows for the performance culture we want to create and nurture.

2 - Bringing it to life - You then need to live and breathe this within your culture - for us that means everything from building it into our recruitment processes, to how we manage probation, calibration processes to how we reward and promote people. Key to this is setting out what differentiates performance on a measurable scale of 1-5.? Having this clearly defined means everyone is playing by the same rules, “but he’s really nice” no longer cuts it.

3 - Call it as you see it? - This stuff only works if you are constantly spotlighting the behaviours and attributes you want to champion and acting immediately when there is misalignment.? Sometimes expectations just need to be clarified in order for people to understand the disconnect, and in other instances, the person just isn't right for the business at that point in time. And that's okay. It's then up to us to have a grown up conversation about it in the moment.

Doesn't that stuff all make sense? Seems easy, right?

“It’s too hard”, “it's too complex”, “we don't have the time”, and “I don’t have the resources”. I've heard it all and seen it all.?

My answer is simple, you need to realise your culture is everything in your company. You are nothing without determining and upholding it.

Still here? Cool.

Addressing deadwood.

Now you have your haves from your have-nots, what do you do? How do you act??

This is hard. This is the part where it is the most difficult but honestly the most important. Ignorance is bliss to these things, but once you know about a fatal flaw then the ticking of the clock becomes unbearably loud.?

I personally, as a human being, am bad at this stage. I care about people, I believe that anyone can redeem themselves from a bad situation with the right attitude and the right effort. This leads me to find excuses and give people time and support to improve.

Sadly though, as I have said many times to my son Josh and how incredibly he schooled me this weekend, these things are all excuses, not reasons.?

Having values and not upholding them is worse than not even having them. This is the single truth and why so many organisations do not have them, as they know they won't be able to keep up the effort to make it work. They know full well that without a purpose and a transparent value-based system, they are just making up excuses continually and not addressing the issue.

Every company on the planet is just the material collective efforts of what everyone in their organisation does every day. If you get the right people and you have the proper rituals, then amazing things happen. On the other hand, the rot can set in fast if you get those two things wrong.

If we go back to that definition of deadwood - “organisational drag through people or things that are no longer useful or productive”. In that sentence, the word “productive” stands out for me.?

So here are the fundamentals to ask yourself or your HR department:

• How do you measure productivity in your company?
• How do you bring together talented people who embody your signs of productivity?
• How do you continue to develop this talent to help the fires burn in them?
• How do you recognise those who shine brightest and those whose fires burn low?
• How do you act when you know what you know?

To give you readers a deeper insight into the above, in next week’s addition of Double-click I’ll be bringing to the party the one person at 11:FS who really does live and breathe this stuff day in day out. Chief People Officer, Hannah Thompson is going to share what she defines as the 7 principles of a high performance culture. So come back next week folks! ?

But until then, there is one last step to wrap this thing up.?

Falling at the last hurdle.

There is one last stage of this, and it is one that I think 11:FS is okay at, but even we can do so much more.?

It's difficult and uncomfortable and dividing and demotivating for some, but after all of this, when decisions have been made and conversations have been had,? I believe you have to communicate this stuff to everyone.?

You have to let those people who are crushing it know so that they continue to crush it some more, but equally you have to let those people who can no longer ride the ride know that it's time to get off. And then you have to tell their teams, and eventually the whole company.?

This is hard. We all want to be nice people. No HR department wants to deal with that in any corporation around the world. Neither do you want those communications to be whispers on the lips of people in back rooms or the pubs.?

You want to be humane, but equally, you need people to know that while there is no ceiling to the attitude and achievements that they can deliver, there is entirely and impactfully a floor that is rigorously enforced.

Talent gets that. Talent wants to work with talent. They want to know that overperformance and underperformance are recognised and addressed. Not ruthlessly and indiscriminately but with precision, empathy, urgency and kindness.?

The metaphor that many have used to describe the difference between a good and great team performance is that we are a sports team, not a family.?

Families have to put up with weird uncle Stu and crazy auntie Victoria as blood is always blood, and allowances and compromises are often made. Sports teams recognise that either through players moving onto different teams, or whether players fail to perform to the level needed or within the boundaries of acceptance, that they are asked to move on or just not play in the team.?

This is uncomfortable, but businesses are not families. They are high-performing teams of teams focused on the objectives of the organisations within the boundaries of the value system the business chooses. There is no place for weird uncles in business.?

If you don’t let your people know what you have stood up for, as far as they are concerned you’ve stood up for nothing.

I'd love to know your thoughts on this and open up for dialogue more. How should businesses communicate people leaving their company due to underperformance both internally and externally?

See you in the comments.

Dx