When It's Time To Move On From Employees "Who Got You There"

When my company was young, we worked with two contractors who played key roles in client services. As we grew and defined our core values — singling out accountability as our top priority — it became clear that these contractors did not meet our newly defined standards. They were often difficult to catch on the phone, noncommittal about deadlines, and understandably had more of an individual, not team-based, approach to their work.

Because they were such strong performers and clients liked working with them, I tolerated their behavior. However, when other team members pointed out the double standard in expectations, I realized that I had let the situation go on for too long, inadvertently placing our managers in a no-win situation. Ultimately, we decided to move away from the contractors — not because their work wasn’t strong, but because they weren’t aligned with our new values and expectations. They did not want to be full time employees and our client service model did not work anymore with how they wanted to work. It was done openly and respectfully.

When companies evolve at a rapid pace, some people can't keep up with change, don't want to change or what they did well before just isn't needed anymore. The result is that some individuals who fit our company in its early years struggled as we grew.

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Often, I doubled down on an untenable position to keep an employee on because I didn’t understand how much harm the wrong fit could cause — especially when a person had been with us for so long. A very common example is when you have someone who is a great individual contributor, but who really struggles as a manager. They don't want to have someone above them, but they also really don't enjoy and aren't good at building a team. Something has to change.

How We Define “Fit”

Companies turn down talented people every day when the fit isn’t right. According to the Jobvite Recruiter Nation Report 2016, 60% of recruiters say culture fit is of utmost importance in hiring decisions. The wrong fit can be disastrous, but when the employee fits the role perfectly, the whole team benefits.

Much of the dialogue around company fit assumes that it’s a concrete concept: Round pegs go in round holes and, once they’ve found the right spot, stay there. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. What if a round peg develops sharp corners, or a round hole expands over time?

For sure a big part of fit is core values. However, people and the needs they fulfill evolve constantly, especially in small companies that grow very quickly. A good fit isn’t just about putting the right person in the right seat, but about putting them there at the right time.

One of the things that separates good leaders from great ones is the ability to recognize when those three factors are out of alignment and to act upon that information, particularly in the case of a loyal, long-term employee who is under-performing. In some cases, a role change might be the right choice. In other cases, you might have to have a more difficult conversation.

How to Take Control of Fit

You don’t have to sit on the sidelines and watch your company’s culture evolve away from your best employees. With the right processes in place to hire and develop talent, you can retain your high performers without sacrificing your culture.

These three strategies can help you create a positive environment and develop employees who prosper within it.

1. Implement personality tests to discover purpose and talents. 

No test reveals everything about a person, but learning about what drives someone can help you see where they would fit best in your company as it evolves. We all have very natural strengths and weaknesses and most people do much better work when they are playing to their strengths.

One of the programs we have used at Acceleration Partners is designed to find a person’s “why” — their primary purpose in business and life. It has been really helpful for many employees to better understand what drives them and how they can leverage that strength.

When we first started this program, we discovered one manager had hired an entire team of people with the same "Why". Unintentional bias in the hiring process had created a team with overlapping strengths and weaknesses and explained some of the troubles they had been having.

While there are no right or wrong types, having too many people with similar personalities on the same team tends to lead to confirmation bias and groupthink. Distributing different personality types across hiring committees is a good way to glean more-accurate assessments of candidates and limit the influence of personal bias.

2. Rethink employee development and exits. 

Deciding to make a change can be hard, but the exit process can be far more respectful and open. Recognize that a great employee is not an absolute, we think of an "A Player" as the right person, in the right seat at the right time.

This situation occurs frequently in professional sports. The structure of a team shifts, and a longtime player no longer fits in the team's plans or the system of a new coach. Both the player and the coaches recognize the change, the player leaves for a new team, the organization moves in a different direction, and everyone is amicable about the changes.

Instead of treating employee departures as taboo, we embrace a concept we call Mindful Transition. We encourage employees to discuss their goals and plans for the future openly with their managers, even if those plans don’t mesh with their current roles or don’t involve staying with the company. Most employees leave because they feel their opportunities for growth are limited, according to iCIMS. Encouraging honest conversations helps us identify areas of opportunity we would have otherwise missed and plan for the future if an employee doesn’t intend to stay over the long term. We have created a culture of trust and safety to allow these conversations to exist and to come to a long term solution together.

Dealing with departures using our Mindful Transition process also spreads our company’s influence to other industries. We had an employee at Acceleration Partners who had been with us for many years and started with us when we were still in quite small. He was a great employee, well-liked by colleagues and clients, and he loved working in our industry.

After open and honest discussion, we concluded that what he wanted to do and what gave him motivation everyday was slowly disappearing from his role. What he was being tasked to do instead was not something he enjoyed as much. We talked to the team and tried to figure out how we could get the employee back into what he loved doing. The problem was that while we saw a need for an entire position encompassing what he wanted to do, it was one to two years away, and he needed a change sooner. As luck would have it, around the same time, a partner at a fantastic company reached out with a job description and asked if we knew anyone that would be good for that role. We let him interview for the role and helped him get it. Facilitating his departure not only left everyone feeling positive but also set up an ambassador for our culture at another company and added to a strong pool of alumni advocating for us in the marketplace.

3. Recognize that experience doesn’t equal fit. 

According to Mark Murphy, founder and CEO of Leadership IQ, 89% of new hire failures are due to attitude, while just 11% are due to a lack of skill. All candidates need a baseline of technical skills to succeed, but the best candidates are well-rounded people whose intrinsic characteristics align organically with your company’s values.

One of our core values is “excel and improve,” so we seek out candidates who embrace continual improvement and have demonstrated a commitment to lifelong learning. If they are self-aware and can demonstrate that they love learning new things, we can train them tactically on the ins and outs of the job.

Many companies want to hire candidates who can come in and immediately do the job. The appeal is understandable: Experienced hires come in with the relevant knowledge and experience for the position you need filled now. But although they typically start in their positions with the necessary skills, they often don’t have much growth potential. Eventually, as the company and demands grow, the needs of the positions overtake them. In contrast, less-experienced but high-aptitude hires may need more training feel and may be a bit overwhelmed in the beginning, but they have the raw ability and desire to grow with your company and adapt to the needs of the position.

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?In my experience, the people who personify our core values outperform the ones who possess more experience but lack the right raw ability or makeup. Moreover, candidates who align with our core values actually have a higher ceiling when it comes to professional growth. Although other candidates may show up with strong experience in our industry, they don’t necessarily share our values.

Leaving interviews solely up to managers who may feel pressure to get positions filled fast doesn’t always produce good results. We take this responsibility out of their hands with a cross-functional hiring committee that helps decide what’s best for the company rather than the specific department or manager.

We assign people who are comfortable challenging each other’s assumptions to hiring committees, and we always include someone who doesn’t have a stake in the outcome. Interviews revolve around the specific job requirements and our core values. Focus too heavily on one or the other, and you may end up with someone who you really like but who can’t do the job, or someone who does the job well, but clashes with your culture.

Fit between employee and company is not a one-time check on a list of hiring criteria; it’s a constantly evolving relationship that changes to meet the needs of the time. Don’t leave your company culture and employee fit to chance. Embrace the challenge: Seek out candidates who embody your values, invest in growing your people and made the hard decisions when a fit that once was strong is no longer.

This article was adapted and updated from a past post on Harvard Business Review.

Robert Glazer is the founder and CEO of Acceleration Partners, an award winning performance marketing agency ranked #4 on Glassdoor's best places to work and the author of the international bestselling book Performance Partnerships. Join 40,000 global leaders who follow his inspirational weekly Friday Forward, invite him to speak, or follow him on Twitter.