Do you have the right employees?

Are your employees helping your company to be the best?

In Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great, he talks about the five levels of leadership. This article is about ‘Level 2: Contributing Team Member.’ 

 What I’ve noticed in my career as a Chief Financial Officer, are managers hiring employees and keeping them even though they aren’t a good fit for the company any longer. These employees were hired for a particular skill set for a specific position and no longer meet the needs of the company, but don’t fill that need anymore.

The most common hire is what Collin’s calls a ‘Level 1: Highly Capable individuals.’ These are people who have the skill set you are looking for to fill a position in the company. These are good employees, but they may not get you to the next level.

What you need to get you to the next level are the ‘Level 2 Contributing Team Members’ within your employee pool. They not only have the skills we are looking for but use their skills to help the company succeed.

You probably already know what kind of employees you have. Some will be level 1; some will be level 2 and you will have some that don’t meet the minimum of level 1. You may not be able to have all your employees be level 2 but having some will inspire your level 1 employees to do better. It’s the employees that don’t meet level 1 that are the problem, (they can bring down your corporate culture and cost you money). To paraphrase Jim Collins analogy of a business being a bus, make sure you have the right people on the bus, in the right seats on the bus.

It's vital to remove from your company the employees that don’t meet the minimum level any longer, as soon as possible. Their attitude and work ethic will undermine the company and adversely affect the rest of your employees. You want all the team members pulling in the same direction.

The bottom line is these underperforming employees are reducing your company’s profitability, increasing your stress and sabotaging the effort of the other employees.

References:

https://expertprogrammanagement.com/2018/05/good-to-great-collins-summary/