Firing

About bad apples and how to throw them out. That's a clickbait title for you and has nothing to do with the content of this chapter.

One person in your team is not delivering. There’s a lot of subtile messaging in that sentence. Let’s dig down. I think everyone in the team deserves a chance, and also an opportunity to be an individual. Because guess what, we all are.

A leader that can accommodate for the very different spread of personalities, reactions, emotions, individuality, ways of expressing oneself, ways of communicating and experience situations – will be successful. Nobody said it was easy.

A good leader will also see that they can not fully do all of the above, but they could try and that's already much better than most managers. The task driven managers.

Task driven managers are very focused on getting the job done (at all costs) and anyone who is not “delivering” is a bad person and is not “good”. All according to the task driven manager.

On the other hand you have the people-oriented leader who delegates, empowers and motivates their team(s) to find their own solutions. This is a great recipe for building autonomous self-organised teams. And, if you may, “high performing”.

This is relevant, as the perception of “bad apples” or “bad people” is mostly subjective.

Getting back to that sentence “One person in your team is not delivering” — it's probably coming from a task driven manager who wants to get job done, and doesn't hesitate to jump in, roll up their sleeves and do it themselves if they have to.

They also know how to do things faster, better and smarter. The only reason they didn't do it in the first place is because they are the manager, and they get others to do stuff. Right.

There are many of reasons why someone in the team may not be “delivering". First of all – did they get any help? Help and support is a good thing, and everyone needs it in various form in order to grow and get “better”.

(Not necessarily via someone telling them stuff, but hey lets not write an entire Agile coaching book here).

Read more in "The CTO Playbook" available on Amazon/Kindle.