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Sometimes the bosses have to difficult decisionsthat’s why Louie Bernstein once fired his best seller.
In 1986, the then 34-year-old founded an Atlanta-based IT training company called MindIQ. A few years later, he hired someone who quickly became his own top sellerBernstein said “Catalyst” on LinkedIn video series last week.
“I interviewed this woman who presented herself brilliantly. She had a good personality – so I thought – and I ended up making her an offer… She started selling right away,” said Bernstein, now 72. old sales manager and leadership consultant.
Once he started working with her, she discovered that he lacked one major soft skill, without which he said he was a nightmare to work with: coaching.
“In the end, I felt like we had a cancer and I was the surgeon who had to remove it to save the company,” Bernstein wrote. The LinkedIn post of 2022. “Shortly after his departure, sales soared along with the attitude and harmony of the office.”
You can’t “outsource” the hard choices.
Bernstein’s salesman often bragged about his performance, and how his colleagues were not at his level, he wrote. This left a bad taste in the mouths of his peers, and when Bernstein caught wind of his behavior, he advised him to change. He refused, but because of his sales record, he swept it under the rug, he said.
“I let go of the toxic qualities of my main salesperson,” Bernstein said. “The red flag started to go up, but I still gave him the benefit of the doubt.”
When Bernstein’s employees were unhappy with each other, he told them to work out their differences on their own, rather than handle the problem himself, he added. The result: an explosive argument of shouting and crying, Bernstein said.
The loss was the push he needed to fire the employee and learn the importance of taking control as a leader, he said: “There comes a time when a manager has to make tough decisions. You can’t outsource them. .”
After that, Bernstein said, he started asking job candidates questions like, “How well did you work with someone when you ran into a problem in the middle of a project?” and “How do you deal with people you disagree with?” — and taking their answers seriously.
The kind of employee you never want to be
It’s acting like they owe you something, or in this case, acting like they’re above criticism and constructive criticism. a major red flag in any workplaceworkplace culture expert Tom Gimbel told CNBC Make It in April.
But many people struggle to receive tough opinions gracefully. If you fall into that category, leadership and mental toughness expert Scott Mautz has some advice for you.
First of all, focus only on managing your reaction and trying to avoid an initial explosion. “Take a breath and focus on that breath (and) name what you’re feeling so the emotions lose a little of their hold on you,” Mautz wrote to CNBC Make It last month.
“You can then listen and ask questions to fully understand the feedback,” Mautz wrote. “It’s not about minimizing your emotions, it’s about managing them… People with strong minds manage their emotions so they can respond with intention.
Finally, try to separate the ego-bruising part of the feedback from anything that can be interpreted as genuine advice to improve your performance. The more you hold on to helpful criticism and filter out the fluff, the more you’ll demonstrate that you’re coachable and able to incorporate feedback into your job performance, Mautz wrote.
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