“Layoffs, 300+ point drop in the Dow, Home foreclosure, $700B bailout, factory owners abandon their businesses, 200% increase in fuel costs…”  Let’s make no mistake, while I am an eternal optimist, times are changing, the world is changing, and we are not immune.  While we are having a record breaking year, in the last 4 weeks, we’ve had 6+ events reschedule or just flat out cancel.  Let me reassure you personally that we are in one of our strongest financial positions because we have been preparing for this for the past 2 years and we too are looking at how to lead through challenging times.

I’ve had a book that has been brewing in me for the past 10 years.  This book is called “The Light and Dark Side of Team Building”.   On one side would have the Light Side of Team Building.  These are all the concept that you know and love and that we’ve been preaching since the beginning, such as inclusion, diversity, consensus, facilitation, out of the box thinking, etc.

Then you would flip the book over and it would be titled “The Dark Side of Team Building”.  You can hear Darth Vader breathing as you open the cover on this side of the book.  Inside here would be dark team building concepts such as assimilation, command and control, traditional thinking, sheep-ism (all having same thoughts/running over the cliff together), and of course, this month’s topic, EXCLUSION.

Over my years, I see all leaders having a reluctance to talk about powerful team building tools that have been used over the course of time.  Can you remember a time when a team got stronger when you ejected a challenging, problem person on the team?  Can you remember a time when you got addition through subtraction?  Tough times forces great leaders to make VERY VERY difficult choices.  Since one of our driving human needs is for connection, most people do almost anything to avoid breaking off an existing relationship, even if the relationship is hurting them, let me repeat, HURTING THEM.  Good times lets leaders get by with marginal decisions and so tough times separates the good leaders from the great leaders by the tough and correct choices they make.

In talking with people over the past decade, I have multiple stories of leaders who ejected a team member after working with them for an extended period of time to improve their behavior and that the team had a sudden boost in team morale and productivity.  I’m not talking about cutting the star, I’m talking about cutting out a cancer.  I’m talking about team members who are not pulling their weight, that bring in toxicity to the teams, that bring teams down with their mere presence.  What hurts you most as a leader is the fact that this person still exists in the organization sends a message that mediocrity is OK.  I don’t think that if you’re reading this article, that you think mediocrity is OK, in fact, I think that you as a leader demand the most of your people and swell with pride when you see someone reach their full potential.

For example, I had made a challenging hiring decision when I was in Microsoft.  Although this person had challenges with the English language, I really thought this person was creative in the way they solved challenges, so I took a risk.  As I directly managed this person, the next 3 months saw a steady decline and showed me the mistake I had made.  This person refused to take any of my coaching, rebelled against existing successful practices, chose to do it their way which was worse than existing practices, and missed almost every commitment he had made on a weekly basis.  It took me another 3 months to successfully eject this person by taking hours of tracking, CYA, and performance reviews.  I’ll never get that 6 months of my life back, but I’ll always hold the lesson that most business owners and managers will say, “Once you make the decision to fire, you only wish you would have made it sooner.”

So with this lesson, I challenge you as a leader to use these tough economic times to see if you’re making the tough and correct decisions.  Look at the team you have and if you have to or need to make cuts, look to see if you can increase your team’s ability by making a decision that you’ve either not realized you needed to make or that you’ve just been putting off for a long time.  I look forward to your stories of this or other Dark Side of Team Building skills, if you have one, please reply to john@geoteaming.com.

John Chen
CEO, Geoteaming

PS: I’ve been working on a inclusion/exclusion based team building event that is focused on what great managers do to retain the talent they have, if you’re interested in becoming a pilot group, please call me direct at (206) 856-8491.  It’s very revolutionary and high emotional impact, so don’t call unless you’re prepared to really examine this issue…