Hire slow, fire fast. And don’t forget the slow part.
I’ve seen the following scenario play itself out dozens of times over the years.
Month 1—The CEO begins to have concerns that the CFO she’s hired is not performing at a level necessary to scale the company.
Month 2 through 6—The CEO becomes more and more concerned as the CFO’s projects are slipping and his team is becoming dysfunctional.
Month 7—The CEO decides she needs to bring in a new CFO...at some point. Now is not the right time given how busy things are, so she puts it on the back burner.
Month 8 through 11—The CFO’s poor performance continues.
Month 12—After more missed deadlines, the CEO decides she’s finally had enough and fires the CFO. The CFO’s work and all his direct reports now land on the CEO’s desk.
Month 13—The CEO, overwhelmed by the additional work, hires a new CFO after a one-month search in which she only interviewed three people.
3 Months Later—The CEO fears she might have made another poor hire as the new CFO doesn’t seem to be working out as she hoped.
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 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 are 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 a 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 ranges from five to twenty-seven times the person’s annual salary. A mishire for the leadership team will be even more costly when you factor in the lost productivity, onboarding costs, and low morale. And with the typical company hiring high performers 25 percent of the time (again, according to Topgrading), that means that 75 percent of the time, they actually 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 are highly valued by their current employer. 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 your leadership team. A mediocre leadership team member is like a cancer in your organization. It’s crucial that you cut it out as soon as possible because it is probably spreading to other areas of your organization.
But it’s also critical that 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 does not mean moving slowly in interviewing and evaluating potential candidates. It means taking the time to find the right candidates. Once you find a strong potential A-player for your leadership team, your evaluation process (phone screen, interviews, etc.) should move swiftly. You don’t want to miss out on a game-changing A-player because it took you three weeks to schedule a phone interview.
This is an excerpt from my book, Breakthrough Leadership Team*. You’ll find many more leadership insights when you buy the book right here:
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