Last week we talked about applying self-healing tactics to the tools, systems, and infrastructure that are a critical path to a productive business day. We also discussed ways to make downtime less of a factor for the tools, systems, and infrastructure that can’t self-heal.
While these efforts are useful, creating resiliency and the ability to “take a punch” aren’t limited to tools, systems, and infrastructure. Your team can also benefit from self-healing approaches.
Preemptive self-healing
While self-healing is a valuable tactic for saving time & money, and improving productivity regarding your tools, systems, and infrastructure, people are a bit more complex. People are a bit harder to heal, plus the capacity for self-healing varies a good bit between individuals.
Teams, on the other hand, benefit a great deal from preemptive self-healing. Most of this comes out of extreme care taken when hiring. The same level of care is needed when making team assignments. If you look back over time at the problems you’ve discovered on your teams, you’ll likely find some consistency in the ingredients of the turmoil you dealt with.
You might have someone who simply isn’t a culture fit. Or they could’ve been a jerk. Maybe both.
You might have inadvertently mixed personality types that simply don’t work well together. There’s some value to “You folks need to figure it out”, but it’s still on you to monitor the situation and make sure the effort is being made. It’s not all that unusual to have two people on a team who are solid, qualified people who don’t jell well with one another for whatever reason.
Whatever drama that creates is not likely worth whatever you think you’re going to gain by forcing them to work together. Sometimes, one of them just has to go. These decisions aren’t easy. It’s not unusual to find that a top performer is also the one who doesn’t jell with the rest of the team.
Toxic top performers
To that end, if you have top performers who are creating problems with the rest of the team, and the problems aren’t something you’ve been able to resolve – sometimes that top performer has to be the one to leave.
We’ve all seen someone who is great at what they do – and lousy at teamwork, or arrogant, or disrespectful, etc. Remember how you felt when they did whatever they did and management did nothing because they were a “top performer”. Now that you’re in charge, are you going to be that manager, or that owner?
No one is irreplaceable.
Read that again. No one is irreplaceable. That doesn’t mean losing them will be a pain-free experience. It may not be. Even so, the damage these people can cause often negates their performance. They can drag down the rest of your team, destroy morale, and prevent others with similar (or even better) skills from blooming because those people simply don’t want to deal with your top performer.
They reveal management’s true self. When the top performer (at least metrics-wise) does things no one else could get away with, it sends a message about what’s important to the company’s ownership: “It’s more important to bring x to the table than it is to adhere to the company’s culture, rules, whatever.”
Similarly, it also sends the message that if you can do X better than anyone else, you can get away with anything. Is that really what you want to represent as a manager / owner?
Self-healing performance
A real top performer doesn’t bring a bunch of baggage to work and spray it all over their peers. They don’t aggravate, emasculate, or reduce the performance of the rest of the team. Just the opposite, in fact. A true top performer not only produces like no one else on your team, but they also make the team better by making each individual better.
They teach. They mentor. Their behavior makes people want to work with (or for) them. People trust them.
On teams where this isn’t how you’d describe your top performers, you’ll often find people and/or teams pulling in different directions – even when trying to achieve the same goal. At some point, your company is going to pay the price for that.
Be very careful who you hire and how you build teams. Don’t forget to be the kind of top performer every team member wants to work with.
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