Comment 5 - Are People Good, Bad, or Do Leaders Just Don’t Know How Our Staff Works? (Part 1)

About 25 years ago, when we had much fewer staff than we do now, I could be more involved in the operation of the business and, consequently, see and experience the behavior of our staff. Everyone knows that when you manage people, there are problems, and it seems inevitable. With this in mind, I decided to measure the number of people causing problems and, at the same time, problematic clients. To do this, I used some tricks with highly trained staff infiltrated into the work teams who reported back to me. We called them firefighters, although you could see them as informants. What we measured was very simple: first, we needed to know the number of people causing problems, as well as the number of clients.

It sounds super complex because you have to define what a problem is, its consequences, cost, etc. But we took the simplest approach: if there was a call or office visit with a complaint about a problem, no matter how big or small, it counted as one, and we would sum up the problems. Of course, complaints about the same problem were not counted again. Once we identified a problem, we sent one of our infiltrated firefighters.

The not very professional results we obtained showed that approximately 10% of employees caused 80% of the problems, and a very similar result was found with problematic clients. The most curious thing is that if you remove that problematic percentage, another group that was not previously problematic now becomes a problem.

It’s not confirmed, but it's said that Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, had a policy of firing the bottom 10% of employees each year. In my perspective, although GE is a very large and powerful company, I don't think it gained much advantage from this policy.

What to do with this information? I believe we have to take it as it comes and see in our businesses how the situation behaves with our staff. What we did, both with "problematic" staff and "problematic" clients, was to approach the people and found that they were not necessarily problematic; they simply had different ways of being, different criteria, different education, etc. And in most cases, we could correct the "problem" simply by talking to the person and seeing if they needed training, if the position was too big for them, or if there was a situation that we could fix. But it’s very clear that our behavior as leaders will determine the results we get.

Manuel Gonzalez