If you were forced by financial circumstances to (perhaps temporarily) lay off every employee but one, who would you choose to keep? Why would you choose that person? Think about it now, so that you make a considered decision if that unfortunate situation occurs. Your company will benefit from that thought process now, even if that person never leaves.
Support, challenge and grow
You might be thinking “Benefit? Are you nuts? How in the world can I benefit from thinking about who will be the last worker standing?”
Easy.
The benefit is that you start thinking about things that help you deal with change, with short term resource deficits (like vacations, travel, etc). And you do it when you are of sound mind and body, not when you are freaking out because you lost your best client, your last line of credit, your best investor/partner, or your most valuable employee.
What are you doing to challenge, support and grow that essential person? What are you doing to challenge, support and grow those who will fill their shoes if they get promoted and no longer perform the critical task that belong to their current role?
The short answer is to document them as noted in the E-Myth. This serves at least three purposes:
- It prepares you for a time when that person can’t do the work due to sickness, family emergency, travel, etc.
- It documents a process so that it can be evaluated for delegation.
- It creates a training asset.
Preparing for these possibilities sends a message that you are building a resilient company. It gives people confidence that the company has their back and that an unfortunate departure, drop in sales or some other negative event isn’t going to kill the company (or put their job at risk) because the company has strategically prepared to take a punch. If you react with behavior(s) rooted in fear, it undermines your team’s confidence and leaves them wondering about the stability of their jobs. They lose focus. Work quality will likely suffer.
Bend but don’t break
The natural opposite of the conversation we’ve had so far MUST be considered: What if this critical person leaves your company? Eventually, it’s likely to happen. People’s needs and wants change. Opportunities pop up – and in many cases, they are opportunities that the person leaving wasn’t even ready for when they started working with your firm. For motivated people who grow their skills and take ownership of things that happen on the job, opportunities “magically” arrive even if they aren’t looking. In fact, opportunities are offered to them regularly because people know them, know what they bring to the table – and most employers want people like that. You probably want people like that.
So one of them might leave. This is likely to happen every few years if your company is a great training ground for people stepping up to the next level, which is a good thing despite how it feels when you lose them. When that happens, what do you do next? Do you have checklists and documentation for the processes those people own every day or every week? Or do you scramble around for a month or more trying to put Humpty back together again?
Deal with this in advance. Talk to the people you’d most hate to lose. What’s their ambition? What is your company doing to feed it? What makes them crazy about the company? How often do those things happen to your most valuable players? How many of the things they do are documented so that someone else can do them when they are on vacation or sick? These people aren’t going to object to this because some of these tasks need to be given to someone else, but they also worry about them when they’re on vacation. They don’t worry because they believe no one else can do their work. They worry because they take ownership. Checklists and process documentation give them some comfort because they’ve put their thinking about the process on paper. Process documentation is more than “Do this step, then do this step.” There needs to be a why, a what to look for, a “get worried and evaluate this if you start to see that“.
How you handle these things is as important as what you’re doing to avoid laying people off.
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