Chris LoCurto

Finding The Life & Business You Really Want

Leadership ·

Here is another excellent guest post by Jon Edlin. Jon is the Marketing Manager for the Nazarene Publishing House. You can follow him on Twitter or Facebook. You should guest post! Read about it here.

I am the type of person who always sees the glass as half-full.   I can usually dismiss a person’s character flaws because I am so hopeful about helping them reach their full potential. Although my wife says she finds this personality trait of mine endearing, it has recently brought difficulty for me in the workplace.  In fact, when I had a difficult employee, I was so busy trying to develop that employee that I did not notice the rest of my team was suffering.

In March, I had the opportunity to attend Dave Ramsey’s EntreLeadership 1-Day Event in Kansas City.  I took away a wealth of information from that event, but what Dave said about building the right team really caught my attention.   Dave mentioned that when visitors meet his team, they are often amazed at how nice everyone is.

Dave went on to explain that of course he has nice people working for him.  He fires the ones who aren’t.  He explained that if you have a team member working for you who you don’t like, there is probably a good reason for that.  Chances are that person could be bringing everyone on your team down.

As soon as those words came out of his mouth, something clicked for me.  My attempts at developing my difficult employee had been unsuccessful and all the while, the morale of my team had been steadily decreasing.  I wish I could say I went back to my office ready to defeat the virus that was plaguing my team, but I didn’t.

I continued to give my difficult employee chance after chance until I lost a perfectly good team member due to the unbearable environment I had allowed.  It was too late to prevent him from moving on, but it was then that I decided to keep the rest of my team from the same fate.  So I did it.  With good reason, I fired the employee that was holding my team back.

Since then, there has been a complete 180-degree shift.  My team is now working on all cylinders. A cloud has been lifted, and for the first time I can see a bright future.

Questions: Who’s holding your team back? If you don’t like them, why are they working for you?

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