I don’t think one of my employees is right for the business. Should I move him on?

We are a small team of 20. I don’t think one of the guys is right for our business. Should we move him on or put up with him?

A group of us were talking about employees and in particular whether we would enthusiastically rehire the ones we had. Tina was the first to confess that she had an employee that she wouldn’t even dream of rehiring.

“Why not?” we asked.

“Because he is so needy. I find him very draining. His work is okay but he needs to be spoon-fed. And I find him high maintenance, no-one else seems to require as much praise and love as him!” said Tina.

“Why are you still employing him?” we all said in unison.

“It seems too hard to let him go, his work is okay he just requires a lot of managing. Anyway he’s the only ‘not-rehire’ in my team of 20 employees – which is just 5% of the business – so I think we can tolerate him. Better the devil you know, and all that,” she said.

And that led to an interesting discussion.

First of all we talked about whether this guy, Mark, was in a key seat. By that we meant that if he was the wrong person, could he really damage the business. Tina told us Mark was a senior member of the business development team and, yes, he was in a key seat.

Next we came up with suggestions as to how Tina could help Mark develop the skills to be more useful. The obvious answer seemed to be to manage him more intensely. But Tina loathed the though of that. She prided herself on running a company where the employees had a clear understanding of the business, took responsibility and didn’t need lots of rules. She was frightened of starting a bureaucracy.

It didn’t need to be that bad, we said, but we all agreed that managing Mark closely would either stifle the growth of the business (if Tina was to spend her time doing it) or impact profitability (if they were to hire another employee to help).

“Plus,” she said, “what message is it giving the rest of my employees if we change the way we operate to suit him? My other employees will think that his style is what I am looking for”.

So Tina answered her own question. Even though Mark was one of just 20 employees, he was the wrong person in a key seat. He had to go.

A few weeks later we got an email from Tina. She had started to have a conversation with Mark when he blurted out that he wasn’t happy at the company and was going to leave. Tina was shocked but secretly delighted. It turned out that Mark had thought he was in the wrong job for awhile but had stuck it out during the GFC because, with a young family, he couldn’t afford to be out of work.

Which goes someway to proving my theory that there are no wrong employees; just wrong businesses for them to work in and wrong seats for them to occupy. So helping an employee to see that they are in the wrong role does everyone a favour.

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Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses: Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business” and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).