Employees Holding you Hostage?

A com­mon refrain that I hear is “We can’t get rid of that per­son, what would we do with­out them?” What is ironic about this state­ment is, that it usu­ally comes after a pro­longed recit­ing of why that per­son is so harm­ful to the team or how they are under per­form­ing. Why do we hang on to these peo­ple? Maybe it’s our fears. Maybe we are afraid that:

• We can’t run the busi­ness with­out them
• We won’t be able to replace them
• Other employ­ees will get mad if we let them go
• We’ll be per­ceived as heartless
• We will hurt them
• We will hurt their family

What ever the rea­son, we are doing our­selves and the rest of our orga­ni­za­tion a dis­ser­vice by doing noth­ing. When we don’t take action we:

• Sanc­tion mediocrity
• Degrade morale
• Heighten our frus­tra­tion and stress
• Lose the respect of our peers and employees

This is like chang­ing the person’s dia­per instead of let­ting them grow up. We are either too afraid, because of our own inse­cu­ri­ties, or we have believed the lie that we can’t live with­out them. We need to either make it real clear to peo­ple what the expec­ta­tions are and the con­se­quences of not meet­ing them, or we need to help them find employ­ment that suits them bet­ter. Sound harsh? Think about how you’re treat­ing every­one else by not tak­ing action. With the job mar­kets full of peo­ple look­ing for work, good help is not hard to find.