How should you handle a toxic employee? How does corporate culture affect your workforce? To find out, Springfield Business Journal Editorial Director Eric Olson sat down with local business consultants Colin McAllister of McAllister Coaching LLC, Don Harkey of People Centric Consulting Group LLC, Jim Hodge of EOS LLC and Ellen Rohr of Bare Bones Biz Inc.
Eric Olson: How would you describe corporate training in one word?
Colin McAllister: Necessary.
Don Harkey: Evolving.
Ellen Rohr: Uncomplicated.
Jim Hodge: Necessity.
McAllister: I’ll give you another one if you don’t want to use that one: undervalued.
Olson: What makes it necessary, and why do you view it as undervalued?
McAllister: Think of it as a sports coaching analogy, where every sports team has a coach. Why isn’t it the same with business? Yet nobody seems to do it. I don’t know the real reason why this is the case. Is it a guy thing? That we don’t ask for directions. Is it an ego thing? I don’t really know, but it is undervalued.
Olson: Do you think that each employee should have a coach?
McAllister: That’s difficult. I usually coach on the CEO level if it’s an individual in a small business. To coach an entire executive team, it would take a team of coaches.
Harkey: If you look at employees coming up, especially millennials, they have a mentor, a person that they go to, not necessarily an outside coach, and they are much more likely to stay in that job. A lot of important training is training people how to be a mentor. You train upper-level management so they can put internal systems in place to teach people how to mentor.
Olson: So, one of your motivations is to increase the amount of commitment employees have to a company?
Harkey: It has an effect on that because it helps engage people in the company and gives them the tools to be individually successful.
Olson: What are your own specialties and what does it look like to implement?
Hodge: I think the niche, my personal skill, is shepherding people. We go in when a CEO is struggling, and what sets us apart from just business consulting I think is that if I go into a company, conduct an assessment and we find a problem, we propose a solution. We stay involved through implementation. If you submit an idea, everyone will agree. It’s like a church committee meeting – everybody’s got a great idea, but next time they meet none of those ideas were implemented.
Rohr: I think another reason why it is undervalued, why it is hard for businesses to see the value compared to sports teams is my Fred Flinstone, Mr. Slate philosophy. When you get promoted to boss, you turn into Mr. Slate, who just directs people and yells at people and just knows everything. So, unless we have a different model, people just resort to that. People often become managers with no concept of what they should be doing so they just turn into this ogre.
Harkey: I think the No. 1 problem in businesses, as it relates to training, is that employees are trained like crazy for their initial job, but they get promoted with no training on how to manage and lead people. So, they wing it. They take one of two approaches, they either yell and scream at you until things are right or take a really timid “I’m your buddy” type mentality, and management is hard. You have to know what motivates people and how to lead them, and they have to be trained in order to do that.
Hodge: I come from a sales background, but I’ve seen it so many times in a sales environment. Take Don – I hate to pick on Don – he’s our top producer, right? So, all of a sudden, we need a sales manager, and we take Don who has no sales management ability at all but he’s our top producer, and we promote him to sales and guess what happens? He’s miserable. He doesn’t have that skillset.
Rohr: There may be another position, a better fit. Maybe it is time to start a new business. Don, you’re a younger looking guy. I still feel like a millennial. I remember being talked to about my attitude.
Harkey: I think millennials are the least tolerant of bad management of any generation in history.
Rohr: That’s a nice way to say it.
Harkey: The great thing companies are finding out is if they design themselves to work well for millennials, they will work well with any generation. Creating a culture that demands performance is what millennials want.
Hodge: I think a lot of it is cultural differences. When I was dealing with other baby boomers in leadership roles 25 years ago, they were very resistant to change, very resistant to admitting they had a problem and needed training. Millennials are able to say, “Hey, I know what I’m good at, I know what I’m not good at it.”
Rohr: You’re right, yeah. Mr. Slate would never ask for help.
McAllister: Command and control only works to a certain degree. People don’t quit their job. They quit their boss. So putting others needs ahead, what’s your motivation? Is it self-serving?
Hodge: We used to call it management through intimidation. You have managers that say, “If you don’t like it, here’s the door. There are 25 people who want this job.” And that used to work back in the day.
Olson: Let’s say you’re a manager in a position, but you’re struggling with the new responsibilities. What do you tell them?
McAllister: A good coach is based on a good relationship. You have to establish a relationship, and it’s got to be fun to an extent. You do a lot of listening, then you can start doing a lot of suggesting. Then you get into discussions, and you reach a joint conclusion rather than telling somebody what to do. You’re bringing out the best in somebody.
Rohr: But they’re just spokes. There has to be one person at the top. I know that isn’t what always happens, but I think there has to be one vision for an organization. If that’s compelling enough, we might do the mundane work that is required to get there. If the reason is compelling enough, you will wear a scratchy uniform, you will comply, because at the end of the day, those are just sloppy potatoes compared with the big picture.
Harkey: I love that.
Olson: So the type of training matters?
Harkey: If you are a company struggling with employee engagement, and you pull a whole bunch of employees into a room and tell them how important employee engagement is and they go back working, then nothing has changed. There’s no impact, and management is like, “I trained you to be more engaged. Why aren’t you more engaged?” That’s why we don’t do that. We instead say, if you want employee engagement, start engaging your employees. Get your hands dirty, start fixing the problem.
Rohr: Exactly. That’s why you can give me a vision board, an interest board, an essay or it can be something more formal, but they all have some of the basic things. What they want to do, why they want to do it, they’ve got that – but the team ultimately does that. Then you assemble the team and ask, “Why don’t you like working?”
Harkey: The approach we’re talking about is that training works better when the employees pull it from you rather than you pushing it to them. When the employee tells you what’s going wrong and you help them fix it, it is now applicable.
Hodge: The bottom line is that if this president does not back this concept, it’s just not going to succeed. It doesn’t happen.
Olson: What are some recurring things you’re seeing or getting calls about within organizations?
McAllister: Communication is always a big thing. If you don’t have that, you’re a real mess.
Harkey: We hear a lot about how to handle toxic employees. You’ve got employees that are just fighting people every step of the way, but they’ve got some indispensable quality to the company. But I say dispensable because that’s always a myth. We try to help coach them through a process that they can handle that employee. It’s like saying, “Hey, we’re going this direction, and I’ll do everything I can to help get you back in line. But if you don’t like that direction, we’ll promote you to an office outside of our organization.”
Olson: So that’s where the idea that success or failure is the objective and getting them to success or failure as quickly as possible comes in?
Harkey: That’s exactly right. One toxic employee can reduce the engagement of a team by 30-40 percent. It makes sense because, what are your employees thinking about while they drive to work? They’re thinking about how to manage around that one person. It takes a lot of time or energy to deal with that person. So you have to get them on board, or off board.
Rohr: But here’s the thing – you can’t change anybody. This changed my life, saved my marriage, and I wish I found this out earlier. You can only control you. It is a liberating concept. So, what you can change is your standards, your accountability, but you will never be able to get into their head. The paradox is once you change everything changes around you.
Harkey: What we can change is how that attitude comes out. We can’t have you sitting with your arms crossed, rolling your eyes or doodling in the meeting.
Rohr: That’s right. We can change their behavior but not their minds. And sometimes it is just somebody being weird. Let’s talk about Meyers-Briggs. I celebrate these kinds of tools if they’re used to explore diversity because sometimes it is just a crabby guy. Does he have to be Mr. Sunshine? Do we have to make a federal case he wasn’t happy, or can we let him let out some steam?
Hodge: It’s hard to sit here and be objective with each other, and you don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. You know, it takes a unique skill.
Olson: There’s a lot of talk about succession planning. What are the methods you use to develop a proper succession plan?
Harkey: I think the first thing is to sit down before you’re like, “Oh look! I’m sick, time to sell my business now.” You have to sit down and think about it at least five years before they want to.
Hodge: It is something we don’t want to talk about. I’m an entrepreneur, I gave birth to this company, and to sit down and talk about not being in this company, I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about my own mortality.
Harkey: But it doesn’t have to be about death. Any business owner who has become key to their business and has driven that company to success has become a slave to that business.
McAllister: I tell everyone I work with that your job is to replace yourself. It is counterintuitive, but that is key.
Olson: There are more generations working together than ever before. What do we need to be mindful of when working with somebody from a different generation?
Hodge: It’s all about quality of life. It’s about family. It’s about flextime. Versus the old days when our culture raised us to be very motivated: You go to college, buy a house, have three kids and you’ve succeeded at all costs. If [a young female employee] has a baby, she’s going to use up the full time that she’s allowed. You have to understand that.
Harkey: There are a lot of myths about generations out there right now. And if you go in the mindset of those myths, you create those myths. If you go in thinking millennials are lazy and don’t want to work, you’ll probably have millennials who are lazy and don’t want to work. If you create that expectation, that’s how people will act.
Hodge: Do you believe that, Don? Do you see that?
Harkey: Oh yeah, I see that. Boomers invented the 60-hour workweek. and millennials are pushing back on it. The millennials grew up in the 1990s where everything was looking good, went to college and couldn’t get jobs. They were the first generation where the promise wasn’t truly delivered. But they are also taking control of their careers. If they don’t see purpose, they will go work at Taco Bell for better flexibility so they can do things they find meaningful, like spending time with their families.
Rohr: I go back and forth – is the discussion about stereotypes helpful? If we used these personality tools to embrace diversity, we have to be sincere about letting people be what they are rather than saying, “You’re a millennial.”
Harkey: You have to understand perspectives. I keep going back to it, but millennials do not tolerate bad management.
Hodge: You’re exactly right. What’s the secret in retaining those millennials?
Harkey: Giving them a purpose.
Interview excerpts by Features Editor Emily Letterman, eletterman@sbj.net.
