Fire Fast, Hire Slow
Here's a scenario I've seen play itself out dozens of times over the years.
● Month one: The CEO begins to have some real concerns. The CFO she's hired isn't performing at a level necessary to scale the company.
● Month two through six: the CEO gets even more concerned as the CFO's projects are slipping, and his team is becoming dysfunctional.
● Month seven: the CEO finally decides she needs to bring in a new CFO…at some point. Now's not the right time because things are so busy, so she puts it on the back burner.
● Months eight through eleven: the CFO's poor performance continues. After more missed deadlines, more great people leaving the team, the CEO finally decides she's had enough. She fires the CFO. The CFO's work and all his direct reports now land smack on the CEOs desk.
● Month thirteen: the CEO, overwhelmed by all the additional work, hires a new CFO after a one-month search in which she only interviewed three people. Three months later, the CEO fears she might have made another poor decision because the new CFO doesn't seem to be working out like she hoped he would.
Delaying the firing of an underperformer due to a fear of being short-staffed is called the C-player trap. Leaders think, "If I lose this person now, I'll have a big mess to clean up." So they wait until things break and they can no longer tolerate the person's poor performance. So now it's been more than a year, and the poor performer has left all sorts of carnage in their wake - bad hires, poor results, dysfunctional teams - you've waited until the last minute to get rid of them, and now you're short-staffed and feel the need to hire someone quickly.
Not only have you kept someone who was hurting your company, you're probably going to make the same mistake again because you're in a rush to hire the replacement. What you've done is fire slow, and hire fast, which is exactly the opposite of what you should be doing. If you're hiring too quickly, you're probably not evaluating the candidates as patiently and thoroughly as you should.
Research from Topgrading shows that the average cost of a mishire could range anywhere from five to twenty seven times the person's annual salary. A mishire for the leadership team is going to be even more costly when you factor in lost productivity, onboarding costs, and low morale. With the typical company hiring high performers only 25% in the time - again, that's according to Topgrading - that means 75% of the time they actually do incur those painful costly mishires.
Finding A-players can take time. Most are not going to be immediately available, because as A-players they already have jobs and they're highly valued by whoever they're working for. You'll need time and patience to convince an A-player to come work for you. Firing fast and hiring slow is smart regardless of the position you're filling, but it's especially critical when you're hiring for the leadership team. A mediocre leadership team member is like a cancer in your organization. It's crucial you cut it out as soon as possible, because it's probably spreading to other areas.
It's also critical you take your time to find and hire the right replacement. If you can replace that B or C-player with a superstar, productivity is going to climb throughout your organization. One important note: hiring slow doesn't mean moving slowly in the interviewing and evaluation process. It means taking the time to find the right candidates, but once you find a strong potential A-player for your leadership team, your evaluation process should move as quickly as you can without missing a step. You don't want to miss out on a game-changing A-player, because it took you three weeks to schedule a phone interview.
What are you doing to fire fast, and hire slow?