Last week, I was teaching a class on customer service at Wizard Academy – our non-traditional business school in Austin for owner-operated companies and their employees.
Our school’s founder, Roy H. Williams, popped into class and offered up a story on staffing.
“Just fire all the unhappy people.”
Our friend David shared that with Roy. David is a multi-bazillionaire who knows a thing or two about building successful companies.
“Think about the unhappy people in your office. They’re toxic and infectious. Get rid of them. You’ll be doing them a favor, but more than that, you’ll be doing your entire company a favor.”
I admit, this is taking the power of positive thinking to the extreme, but still … I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it for a week.
I think back through all the jobs I’ve had since I started working at age 14. I can remember all the frowny faces and nasty sludgey grumps.
What if they were eliminated from your company?
Maybe you don’t pull that ripcord today … but maybe it’d be fun to think about for a few minutes.
Unless of course … that unhappy person is you.
It’s a 1 woman shop around here, if there is any unhappiness I guess I know who to blame:) Think I could fire the kids.
Yeah, I kept thinking I was gonna have to shrink my hiring presentation down to one page.
Gotta admit it sounds kind of snide and, well, facile when you say it like that. But seriously, if you want to make your employees happy, you got to give ’em two things:
1) great coworkers, and
2) a great boss.
First, you can’t give ’em great coworkers if you allow the low-performers, bitchers, moaners, and complainers to keep their jobs free of the consequences. The high performers won’t drag them up to their level, so they’ll likely go somewhere else — or save their passion for something other than work. And the middling performers stand a fair chance of getting dragged down to the level of the low performers.
Second, you can’t be a great boss if you let nature take it’s course such that you focus 90% of your time on the troublemakers. Fire the low performing, unhappy people — heck, fire the high performing a-holes while you’re at it — and then spend your time working with and fostering the growth of the people who WANT to be there and want to be good coworkers to everyone else at the company. But you can’t do that unless you purposely, consciously set out to do it. Otherwise, you’ll manage the squeaky wheels and the problems, meaning you’ll waste your time on those bitching, moaning low performers.
So… yeah, give the unhappy people fair warning and a chance to change, but fire their ass if they remain habitual drags on your corporate culture and leadership resources. Those kind of people are like vampires — they suck the life out of the organization, and they never see themselves when it’s time to look in the mirror.
Approve.
Tim Miles
Imagination Advisory Group
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