The Growth Series: Article 1 - Get a Meryl Streep . Not a Jenny from the block.

Your business only needs two kinds of people, Great and Good. If you have team members, employees, or colleagues that are neither,?then you have identified your business priority number one: Let them go.

A business, at its core, is generally composed of three main elements an owner/leader can tinker with:

1. The Product/Service (What are you selling?)
2. The Market (Whom are you selling to?)
3. The Operations (How are you selling? Teams, Processes, Tools?).

All are anchored on people.

Do you want to develop/innovate a great product? Get great people. Do you want to sell high-quality services? Get great people. Do you want to make the right decisions by assessing product-market fit or your go-to-market strategy? Get great people. Do you want high-conversion marketing campaigns? Get great marketers. Do you want to sell more or close deals in less time? Get great salespeople. Do you want your customers to advocate your business? Get great support people that never ever let your customers down.

Good people need three things: Tools, Processes, and Empowerment. Great people only need two: Tools and Empowerment. Tools are what they use in their day-to-day whether it's equipment, machine, hardware, software, etc. Processes and Empowerment requires a bit more elaboration.

You see great people are great because they are considered recognized authorities. They know and understand the processes back and forth. Probably can answer questions in their sleep about their field of expertise. They love and most often are obsessed with what they are doing. They just need to be empowered with what they need. Rewards/ Recognition might not mean as much to some of them. They are already aware of their capabilities and rewards/recognitions are just the cherry on top.

I honestly believe that great people are the only perpetual motion entities in this world. You turn them on, leave them alone, and expect great things.

Now good people are the ones I consider needing just a bit of a nudge for them to be great themselves. Training and execution perhaps to get them immersed in the process and be experts. Maybe involvement in bigger scopes, bigger responsibilities. Leading a bigger region, a bigger team. Managing a bigger budget.

Some interesting business stats related to the above:

- 80% of sales are made by 20% of salespeople. The winners sell to the prospects the losers give up on.

- Top sales pros outperform low performers by 10:1 and average ones by 2:1.

- U.S. sales teams spend over $70 billion a year on training. It’s 80% forgotten in 3 months.

- $ 500 billion is lost every year due to employee disengagement. Disengaged employees don’t work as hard as those who are committed to your company.

Diving a bit more into human capital, one of the biggest if not the biggest challenge of most business owners/leaders is the difficulty of finding good and great people. This leads to, in most cases, settling for the not-greats and the not-goods. Equally challenging though in my opinion, and I see this largely in Asia-Pacific, is that most business owners/leaders tend to find it difficult to let people go. Why is it hard to let go? Maybe out of moral responsibility? Out of respect? Like if I trim a hefty 30-40% of non-performing teams or let go of an individual two weeks into his/her employment because of sub-par performance, I'd be considered mean and heartless. "Carlo, she's barely two weeks in. What the fudge?" But if the business tanks, most likely it will be attributed to my mismanaging or my having the wrong type of leadership.

Me.

So personally, I wouldn't spend a penny empowering the not-greats and the not-goods. It would be put to better use as a recruitment budget. No amount of training,?empowerment, or recognition can change an individual who is just incapable. Incapable. INCAPABLE. (Fish to fly. Bird to swim). And this is across the board - Freshers to Senior Execs. You can have great, good, and mediocre interns. You can have great, good, and mediocre freshers. You can have great, good, and mediocre junior associates. So on....

Letting go of the not-greats and the not-goods is healthy. A business leader shouldn't feel any kind of remorse.

Weeding out makes the business strong. Businesses employing people with minimal to no value?have a direct impact primarily on cash flow (OPEX - Salaries). And running out of cash is the number one reason why businesses close. Half of the businesses worldwide close every five years on average across all industries. Additionally, businesses employing people with minimal to no value also puts them in a position of lower probability for breakthroughs and innovations (There goes your Product element of the business - Kaput!).

So trim the not-greats and the not-goods. It's a revenue-generating enterprise, not a charity. How? What are the indicators you ask? Let's cover that in the next article in this series including:

1. How to attract great/good people?

2. How to retain them?

3. What are the best metrics businesses can use as indicators to weed out the not-greats and the not-goods?

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