Am I the @$$hole for Wanting my Employees to Care? | Listener Question

Managing underperforming employees is an art form requiring the finesse of a master painter, and it's one we're unpacking with unflinching honesty in today's episode. Expect to walk away with a blueprint for setting realistic expectations and a toolkit for transforming your team's dynamic. We crack the code on why employees may not share your level of passion for the business and how this discrepancy can actually be a harbinger for change. It's a candid look at the employer's role in fostering excellence, the significance of transparent communication, and the undeniable impact our expectations have on the work environment.

Then, we peel back the layers of the employee-entrepreneur relationship, analyzing why some of your brightest stars might be venturing out on their own. We engage in the tough conversations, breaking down the necessity of clear job expectations, the power of KPIs, and the art of rewarding those who truly shine in their roles. By the time you reach the end of this discussion, you'll be equipped to not only hold your employees accountable but to also inspire a culture of success that resonates throughout your business. Don't miss out on this essential dialogue that's bound to resonate with anyone at the helm of a team, steering it towards triumph.

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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey there and welcome back into Life Beyond the Briefs. Today's episode is answering a user question. This comes from a friend of mine who owns a business, and she's asking about how to handle an underperforming employee, and I started to write a response to this question that she had. But it's one of these things that like it's got so much nuance that really like neither text nor email, I think, is a great medium, and so, while I will respond to her in writing, I thought I'd also make this episode because I think it also is going to apply to many, many law firm owners and partners who have managerial responsibilities out there. And here's the promise is that if you are not a owner and you're not a partner, if you're an associate somewhere, it's going to apply to you also, because I'm going to tie back in how all of this comes back to ownership of your own life and your own business and your own career. So right after the new jingle, we're going to get into it. Here we go to show you how to build a thriving vision. No more living a life that sucks. Let's build a practice that serves our soul For lawyers and, after it's a winning combo, learn the tricks to make your practice, grow From success stories to the ups and downs. We'll navigate the legal world.

Speaker 1: 1:20

Hey, by the way, what do you think of the new jingle? Let me know? So this is created by an AI program called Suno S-U-N-O dot AI, which I was playing around with after going to a mastermind event back in March, maybe March, maybe late February. Anyway, you put in the prompt and you put in the kind of music that you wanted to generate, and it's pretty cool. A program makes up its own lyrics, it performs a song and then you can change around the genre, you can change around the lyrics and it auto-generates its own jingle for you. Ai's got so many creatives out of business.

Speaker 1: 1:55

Anyway, on with the question. So here it is. My full-time employee is a good gal, but she often does the bare minimum lazy work. I'm considering firing her, but I want to check myself first. Am I just a perfectionist asshole who's expecting some random person to care as much about my business as I do? Would love your feedback.

Speaker 1: 2:11

So, um, number one, I don't think you're an asshole for this. I don't think you're a perfectionist for this. Um, but we do have to realize that there is absolutely no reason for our employees to care as much about our businesses as we do, nor should they. The minute that you find your employee caring as much about your business as you do, you should sell the business. I've said this before, but you can't expect the people that work for you, that are there in exchange for a paycheck, that are trading their dollars for hours, to give as much of a shit about your business as you do. You just can't have that expectation.

Speaker 1: 2:46

The flip side of this is that, especially in early stages of building a business, you have to have people around you in certain roles who care deeply about the success of the business and will go beyond the bare minimum lazy work that it sounds like this employee is putting in. And I'll say this there are some roles where the bare minimum lazy work is maybe not acceptable. Well, no, it is acceptable, right? Because as we're growing our businesses, you can't be maximizing everyone everywhere all the time. It just can't happen. And the hard thing about growing an entrepreneurial, bootstrapped startup kind of business, which is what my friend is running, is that the roles evolve for our employees and somebody who we bring in to do one job as our business grows, and there are other things that can be done or should be done. We often shift around those job responsibilities and often six or nine or 12 months into the relationship, we're asking the person to do something, parts of the job that they didn't sign up for or that they didn't want to do or that they aren't good at doing. Right, because what we hired them to do for 32 or 40 hours a week as our business grew became a 50 hour a week job, and so we try to compress those extra 10 or 18 hours into the person who we've hired, because we can't go out and hire another full-time person to do the job.

Speaker 1: 4:20

So that happens and employees tend to take shortcuts and they tend to do bare minimum lazy work, sometimes because you're asking them to do much, to do too much, and sometimes because they're bare minimum lazy people. And so that's the first thing to figure out is like the person who is performing the bare minimum is it because they're overworked and you've given them too much stuff and so they're taking shortcuts on all of the things to um, to just get them across the finish line and just get them to good enough to print and publish and send, or is it that this person is actually doing the bare minimum. And then it comes back to the employer because you know your job has been to manage this person all along, and so if they've been operating for three or six months on this bare minimum, lazy standard of work and you haven't said anything about it, well it's your fault because you tolerated it for three or six months. And this is the part that ties into, like the employee and the career trajectory part is, at the end of the day, everything that happens in your life and in your business is your fault. Everything Because you either recruited somebody who is a bare minimum worker or lazy worker, or you tolerated their backsliding into bare minimum or lazy, or you didn't set up an appropriate framework. For here's what I expect you to do and here's the standards that I expect you to meet. We didn't clearly articulate that the standard was actually I don't know 95% and you wouldn't accept 67% work, and so they've been doing 67% work, thinking that it's good enough.

Speaker 1: 5:49

So, at the end of the day, all of this comes back to our own communication with our people about what we expect, and one of the things that I have gotten better with in recent history really recent history is delegation and in keeping this tight feedback loop with my people about what it is that I expect and whether the product met the expectation. And I learned this in onboarding coaching with my new VA and I've had employees. I've had people working for me for 15 years throughout my legal career and never have had any training on how do you delegate to them, how do you give them feedback and how do you identify number one when they're underperforming, but also help them identify those gaps between. This is B work and here's what an A would look like. And let's get you to an A right.

Speaker 1: 6:38

My best employees throughout the years have been the people who I didn't have to do that with. My worst employees throughout the years have been the people that I didn't give any feedback to, and I recognize it as my own personality trait, my own personality flaw, because I haven't. You know, I've never had to really give somebody feedback and get them better at their job. And this is the thing about lawyers Like we're really good at talking to clients and we're really good at talking to judges and articulating our position, but for some reason, we have this fear around talking to our people and doing the same thing with our people, and so the closer that you keep the feedback loop on here's what I want.

Speaker 1: 7:14

Now I've reviewed the product and here's where it fell short, or here's where it met my expectations short, or here's where it met my expectations or here's where it exceeded my expectations the better your people are going to be and, deep in their hearts, people want to do good work. Nobody, I don't think, wants to go to a job and do a half-assed job, but they go to a job and do a half-assed job because there's other things going on in their life, or they don't actually like the job, or they don't actually like you, or because you haven't articulated what a great job looks like. And so I don't mean to sound too harsh to my friend in giving this feedback, because I suspect that she has actually given feedback to her employee. And if that's the case, if you have said, here's where you're falling short and here's where I'd like you to to excel, and here's where I would like you to put in more work and more effort, then one of two things is happening. Number one you've hired the wrong person or you've tolerated the wrong person for too long and they are not capable of rising to the next challenge that you have for them, or number two, maybe you're undercompensating.

Speaker 1: 8:18

I think a lot of us bootstrapped again people. We want to go out and we want to hire people who have never done this job before, and I see this all the time in small law firms. You go out and you hire a college grad and you make them a paralegal. They don't have any idea what they're doing and they look to you for what's a good job and how do I do my job? And we're so busy working cases that we and we've never been a paralegal ourselves that it's hard for us to give feedback and create systems and processes for them to operate on.

Speaker 1: 8:48

There comes a time in the growth of the business where you need to stop hiring these entry-level people and you need to start paying for expertise for somebody who's been doing it for five or seven or 10 years and of course, you have to impose on that person your own system and your own way of doing things and they have to be able to operate within the framework of what you want. But there comes a time when you have to move past these entry-level people because somebody who is later in their career but has been bopping around from entry-level to entry-level to entry there's a reason for that, right. And again, I don't know whether this is actually what's going on with my friend. I suspect it's that she hired somebody who's truly entry level, um, who just doesn't have the maturity or just doesn't have the curiosity or whatever it is to to operate and to do the above and beyond and the above and beyond people. Here's the thing is, they're hard to find, especially later in the career, because if you were an above and beyond employee, you often graduate to above and beyond business owner, right. And that's the thing about expecting people that care as much about your business as you do, like, by 40, 45,.

Speaker 1: 9:55

Most of the people who are really really great employees, really really great at what they do, in 2024, like, they've gone off and they've started their own thing. And there are exceptions to that. Like, if you are an excellent trial lawyer but you want nothing to do with the business, then you might be an employer. You might be an employee whose compensation is tied, you know, to your results within the business, right, but most of my friends who are really good at what they do and who are above and beyond people have left firms and gone and started their own thing or put themselves at least in a position where their own um, uh, the the business's success is tied to their success. And so and that's not for most people, which is why most people are employees and not entrepreneurs, which is why most people are employees and not entrepreneurs, which is why most employees are show me the metrics, let me hit the metrics and let me go home after that. Now, if you're on the employee side of this, the best jobs that I've ever worked were the ones where it was clearly stated what you had to do and where it was clearly stated okay, you get a promotion or you get a raise or you get a bonus if you exceed the what you have to do metrics.

Speaker 1: 11:03

And the reality is that most small businesses, we don't have any of that stuff right, because it's an ever-evolving position and it's an ever-evolving org chart, and the person who is good at doing one thing often gets asked to do another thing because they're the good above and beyond employee. And this is not the case at larger firms or at corporate style firms, where you might be attorney one or attorney two or attorney three or paralegal. You know A, b, c ranking and you can look at the job description, because this firm has been operated for 50 years, like insurance industry comes to mind. Right, geico has great job descriptions. Here's what you'll do when you're a lawyer. Three, you have to have this many years of experience. You have to have tried this many jury trials, whatever. Like small plaintiffs firms. We don't have anything like that, which is a which is a problem, and it's one of the problems that we try to solve within great legal marketing is is structuring for people who have never uh, who have never managed, people who have never had this structure, because most of us grew up without having this kind of a structure but giving people the framework for how you manage, how you hire, how you create good job descriptions and how you use KPIs for those descriptions.

Speaker 1: 12:13

To tie back to is that person meeting all my expectations or not? Because one of two things happens. If they're meeting all your expectations but you're still of. Two things happens If they're meeting all your expectations but you're still not happy with them, then you haven't articulated the expectations very well. We did this with core values in the law firm a while ago. We're looking at an employee and we're going. Well, she ticks all the boxes for our core values, but we're still not happy with her performance. So maybe there's an unarticulated core value that she's missing, or maybe we should just shut up, maybe we should just tolerate this employee. And it turned out we had a core value that after we talked about it, that wasn't on the board, that should have been on the board, and so that's the first thing that might happen is maybe you have some KPI or something that you're judging on in your head that you haven't made clear to that person. Or, of course, the alternative is that they're not actually meeting the KPIs, and that makes the discussion really easy.

Speaker 1: 13:08

Here's the metrics that we set forth. You agreed to the metrics. Maybe you had some role in creating the metrics and you're not meeting them. Like, help me, help you. We either need to solve for you hitting all the metrics, or we need to solve for I need to get somebody else in here to do your job and you need to move on to something that really makes you excited with a that's within your set of skills that you are happy to go to every day.

Speaker 1: 13:31

And those are hard conversations, and the longer that you put off having those conversations with your people, the worse off you will be and the worse your culture in your firm will get, because you will wake up every morning unhappy to see that person. They will wake up every morning unhappy to see you. And so what you need to realize is that pain is temporary and as soon as you get to the other side of the pain, usually what happens is the rest of the team looks at you and they go. What the hell took you so long? Because that person wasn't very good at the job and the rest of the team was picking up the slack.

Speaker 1: 14:00

And so, to kind of bring this full circle on, the advice that I would give my friend is number one you can't ever expect your employees to care as much about your firm as you do.

Speaker 1: 14:09

Number two if you've been tolerating subpar work, then it's your fault.

Speaker 1: 14:14

And number three if your employee doesn't understand where the bar is and they don't know whether they're a par or subpar, then it's your fault.

Speaker 1: 14:23

Um, and then the last bit on this is if you, you know, if you have an employee who's consistently going above and beyond, we have to reward that, because those people are either going to go off somewhere else, uh, and start their own thing, or they're going to go find a better paying job somewhere, and so you have to continually be evaluating and matching performance metrics with good pay and with bonuses and with great office culture. So I hope that is helpful to you. I'm sorry to tell you that it is all your fault. I do not think you're a perfectionist asshole. I think you are just like every other entrepreneur who wants to hire the them from five or 10 years ago, or at least what we thought we were like five or 10 years ago and I hate to tell you that unless you break yourself of that desire, you are going to be disappointed by everybody that you ever hire. So that's today's episode. I hope everybody has a great weekend.