Before Firing an Underperformer, Ask These 3 Questions

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,510 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 5 minutes to read.

Today, I’m going to share with you three questions I always ask myself before firing an underperformer.

Firing someone is the hardest part of the job. It creates disruption in your business and in the ex-employee’s personal life. It’s a burden of leadership and weighs heavily on our minds.

But, removing underperformers is necessary.

Your team will thank you (and wonder why you didn’t take action sooner). High performers want to work on teams with other higher performers. Underperformers kill their motivation and progress.

There are three questions to always ask before firing someone and will help you make an objective decision.

Did I Set Clear Expectations?

Even the best employees will underperform if they don’t know what the expectations are.

Before you fire someone, you must genuinely explore whether or not you set clear expectations. And by clear, I mean crystal clear (which usually means having tough, and direct, conversations).

Expectations should be specific, measurable, time bound, and written down.

Inevitably on 1-1s you will set new expectations. Follow-up with a Slack/Teams message to document the expectation set.

A litmus test for whether or not you set clear expectations:

Sit down with each employee and ask: let’s pretend it’s the end of the year and we are looking back on everything we’ve accomplished this year. How do you know the year was a success? What does a fail look like?

If their answers don’t align with your expectations, you have more work to do on the communication front.

(Most new(er) leaders struggle with this. They resort to blaming the employees for their woes but, in reality, their leadership skills are undeveloped and they are unwilling to have direct and objective conversations to set extremely clear expectations. Don’t let this happen to you… clear = kind. Setting clear expectations is the kindest thing you can do.)

Are the Expectations Achievable?

We can set clear expectations all day long…

But can they realistically be achieved?

If you are new to setting clear expectations, you will likely develop measurables based on what you “hope” will happen.

Unfortunately, hope is not a strategy.

If you have any doubt an expectation is achievable, it would be unconscionable to hold someone accountable to meeting said expectation. You would be setting them up for failure.

But their failure is your failure.

What are my Core Values?

What if the employee is meeting achievable expectations but something seems off?

This is where your core values come into play.

Your core values are a management tool. You can fire, hire, and promote based on core values. This is a great idea in theory but rarely executed on in practice (which is why you end up with crappy managers at large firms… they got there because they billed a ton of hours, not because they are a culture fit).

If your employees are otherwise meeting expectations but violating one, or multiple, of your core values, you should consider moving on.

This assumes, of course, you have defined your core values and shared them with your team.

When you make an employment decision based on core values, your team will thank you. It will also signal to them that your core values are critically important to you and your firm.

At our firm, you won’t be considered for a promotion unless you have demonstrated a pattern of adhering to our core values.

Here’s what it looks like in practice:

A few years ago we had an employee on our team who was a wonderful person but their tax preparation performance was lackluster.

So we tried this person in two other roles, each time justifying the move with “they are such a great culture fit so let’s find something that works.”

But performance continued to be lackluster for a key reason: lack of ownership.

They couldn’t deliver on promised they made.

It took me some time to realize this person was not a good culture fit at all. They lacked ownership, which is a core value at my firm.

Being a nice, and agreeable, person does not in and of itself make you a culture fit at my firm - you have to take ownership over your work and deliver on internal and external promises.

That's all for this Saturday. See you next week.

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See you again next week.

Cheers,

Brandon

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