Key Question:
A: Don't let a bad employee hang around too long.
Q: What did Miles and David do when they discovered they made a bad hire?
A: They fired the bad hire! And, they fired him quickly.
All entrepreneurs struggle to pull ourselves away from the startup roles we played -- which included doing everything -- to position ourselves as a real leader. We didn't learn the details of the recruiting and hiring process of the person they fired but we can imagine that they thought they were making a good decision.
The number one task leaders procrastinate on is firing. We think the reason is two-fold. First, not one of us wants to hurt the person we have hired. And second, we don't want to admit that we made a mistake. If we just keep trying to work with the new person, maybe they will come along and be the person we dreamed they would be. Most of us are optimists! This means we believe what a person told us in the interview process. We place the halo on the potential employee and have great hopes that they will be our next star.
Q: What made the firing go well enough that Miles and David felt good when it was over?
A: They admitted that they had made the mistake and they paid the person a nice chunk of cash. Miles then gave us all one of the best pieces of advice we have ever heard. He said, if you don't face up to a bad hire you, "spend all of your life managing the problem, rather than managing the opportunity."
Think about it
Does anyone need to be fired from your organization? If you know this, why haven't you done it?
Clip from: Knowledge Management
Westerham and Stockport, England: In this episode of the show we go inside truly global businesses that are changing the way we know things and understand who we are. They are each uniquely helping us all get the information revolution under control and helping to open the way to a knowledge evolution.
You'll meet Miles Corbett and David Bowden and their team in Westerham, England. In their hands information becomes knowledge, and their programs are saving businesses millions of dollars every year.
Then later in the show, you will meet Bill Daring, Jon Keefe, Nick Smith and the team at KMPInternet of Stockport. They are eliminating mundane tasks from the work area and creating access paths over the barriers between languages.
Historically, if knowledge were on a grocery shelf, it would have been among the most perishable items. Here we meet people who are giving knowledge much more shelf space, at a much lower cost, and as a durable good.
Today intellectual property is as important as physical property. Physical property sustains the body -- food and shelter; intellectual property sustains the mind, imparting meaning and value to life.
Go to all the key ideas and video for this episode...
Go to the homepage for this episode...
Transition Associates (DB)
David Bowden, co-founder
Bramis House, 135 Main Road
Biggin Hill
011 44 1959 543 900
Visit our web site: http://transition.co.uk
Office: 011 44 1959 543 900
Business Classification:
Information Services
Year Founded:
Admit Mistakes
DAVID: How far did you get with that interactive Flash/HTML?
Unidentified Man #1: Well, I got to reading.
MILES: (Voiceover) In a small business, people and the way they behave, the way they think and what they deliver are utterly critical to your business. You've got to have the right person in the right job. And if you've made the wrong decision, act quickly.
Unidentified Man #1: You could easily do that as individual movies, yeah.
MILES: We tried to bring this guy into an executive role, leading the sales of the business. Within three weeks, it was obvious to us we'd made a mistake. So, you know, we gave the guy a check, we explained why we felt we were wrong, explained that we didn't think it was going to go anywhere and we moved on. Because otherwise you get distracted, the business goes off course, you spend all of your life managing the problem, rather than managing the opportunity.
