Every team member is a starter—invest like It
When an employee's performance is just okay or they're struggling, it can be easy to just hope they figure it out on there own or spend your time focused on bigger fires (I get it… I've been there).
I hear it all the time when it comes to giving feedback and working with employees who are just kinda skatin' by...
"it probably won't do anything"
"they aren't THAT bad..."
or "they retire soon... so we can just wait it out" <-- the retirement date is usually a solid 1+ years out by the way. yikes.
Time to ditch the excuses and start investing in your team! You may be surprised at how much you all start winning.
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[00:00:00] It's been a while since we've had a good sports analogy, so let's use one.
I was on a panel the other week for an event for Boise State Athletics, an organization near and dear to my heart as a former Boise State athlete. And I was talking on this panel about what I do for a living and how it so relates to sports. And the analogy that I gave is that in college athletics, you've got people there on scholarships.
And those of us who have played sports, been involved in sports, you're parents of kids who do sports, you know that there's starters and there's people who are not starting, or there's people who are sitting on the bench . In college,
If you have a team full of people on scholarship, you're paying all of them to be there, it doesn't really make sense to ignore the person on the end of the bench, because you're just throwing away money. They're never gonna start, you're never investing in them. I think that same way about business, except every single person on your team is a starter.
Everybody is playing. So when you go ignore someone who is struggling or someone who is not performing well, you're actively throwing money away. You are actively not investing in your [00:01:00] organization winning. So think about that next time you have someone who is struggling or is not performing well, that really it's in your best interest to help them perform well, because otherwise you're just throwing away money.
Think about it like you're throwing away the scholarship. In this case, you're throwing away the salary.