You can work your ass off finding a really good employee, hire somebody with all kinds of potential, and then spend the next six months teaching them to be average. And never once tell them to lower their standards.
I've watched it happen. I've been guilty of allowing it to happen. And, if we're being completely honest, I might even have a little experience being the employee who figured out what was actually required of me.
Because that's what people do, especially when they're new. They figure out how things work around here.
Today I want to talk about what happens after you hire somebody with potential.
We spend a lot of time in business trying to find the right people. We recruit for experience, work ethic, attitude, leadership ability, whatever the job requires. Then we bring that person into the company and assume those qualities are going to determine how good they eventually become.
But the person you hired isn't developing in a vacuum. They're developing inside the team you already have.
Think about somebody starting on a landscape crew in the spring. On day one, they're paying attention to everything. They're learning the work, obviously, but they're also watching how everybody around them works.
What time does the truck actually leave the yard? What does a finished job look like? How much does the crew leader inspect before everybody packs up? What happens when somebody cuts a corner? What happens when a customer has to call back because something wasn't done right?
Nobody has to pull the new employee aside and explain which of those things really matter. They'll figure it out.
That's the part I think leaders underestimate. We tend to talk about potential as though it lives entirely inside the employee. Find somebody capable and motivated, give them the opportunity, and their natural trajectory will take care of the rest.
I've just seen too much evidence in my own businesses and other people's businesses to believe that's how it works.
Some people will push themselves no matter who you put around them. Great. Hire as many of those people as you can. But most of us, to some degree, pay attention to what the people around us are doing. We learn what gets recognized, what gets corrected, what gets ignored and, eventually, what qualifies as good enough.
I have watched a new employee come in with all kinds of energy, work hard, ask questions and genuinely try to do a great job. Then, over time, some of that starts to disappear. Nobody told them to stop caring. They just learned the pace of the group. They learned what was really expected.
I've been on the leadership side of that, and I'm not proud of every example. There have absolutely been times when I allowed a standard to slip long enough that the team adjusted to the lower standard.
And that little comment I made at the beginning about maybe having personal experience from the employee side? We'll just leave that one right there.
The problem gets much harder to fix once the habit has become normal. If somebody has worked a certain way for six months and leadership has watched it happen for six months, suddenly tightening things up can feel to that employee like the rules changed. From their perspective, yesterday's acceptable performance became today's problem.
That's a much harder conversation than the one you could have had in week two.
This is also why I think we underestimate the cost of one chronically underperforming employee. Their individual output is the obvious part. If one person isn't carrying their share, somebody else probably has to pick some of it up.
But everybody around that employee is also watching what leadership does about it.
In a lot of companies, the people working beside an underperformer know there's a problem long before the owner does. They know which crew always needs help finishing because one person coasts. They know who disappears when it's time to unload. They know which foreman ends up fixing somebody else's work, or which account manager is constantly cleaning up the same person's missed details.
They're living with it every day.
And if the dependable employee becomes the person who keeps getting the extra work simply because they're dependable, you can create a pretty screwed-up incentive: high performance starts to feel like punishment.
The good employee doesn't have to suddenly become a bad employee for that to cost you something. Maybe they stop volunteering for the extra thing. Maybe they stop jumping in quite so quickly when somebody else falls behind. Maybe they simply decide that if the standard is good enough for everybody else, it's good enough for them too.
None of that requires a big announcement. It can happen a little at a time.
Now, I understand why leaders let performance issues run longer than they should. Sometimes you're trying to be patient. You know the employee is capable of more. Maybe they're dealing with something outside of work. Maybe the labor market is tight and the thought of replacing somebody right in the middle of the season sounds awful.
Those are real considerations. I'm not suggesting that somebody has a bad week and you run them out the door.
But being patient with one employee doesn't relieve us of the responsibility to everybody else. At some point, compassion directed at one person can become unfairness to the people who keep absorbing the consequences.
The High Cost of Avoiding Difficult Conversations
And before we decide the employee is the problem, I think the leader needs to look in the mirror.
Were the expectations actually clear? Have you coached the person when the problem happened, or have you just been irritated about it? Have you followed up? Does the employee know this is still a problem, or are you assuming they should know because you mentioned it once six weeks ago?
I've been guilty of that too. It's easy for a manager to say, "He knows what's expected."
Maybe he does. But saying it isn't the same thing as consistently managing it.
The employee owns doing the job. The leader owns making sure the expectation is clear and then coaching and correcting when it isn't being met. Accountability has to work in both directions.
That matters when we talk about "giving somebody more time," because more time can be exactly what a struggling employee needs. A new crew leader isn't going to be as good on day ten as somebody who's been doing it for ten years, and we shouldn't expect them to be.
What matters is where they're headed.
If they're learning, responding to coaching and getting more consistent, more time may be a very good investment. If the same problem keeps happening and the manager keeps restarting the clock without anything changing, that's different. Giving somebody more time only means something if something is actually happening during that time.
A skill gap is often the easier performance problem to deal with because you can see it and work on it. The harder situations are when somebody can do the job but doesn't do it consistently, or when the leader has allowed the problem to go on for so long that correcting it now feels like a confrontation.
That's where accountability gets confused with being a hard-ass.
Some owners hear "culture of accountability" and picture a manager walking around waiting to catch somebody screwing up. That's not what I'm talking about, and I wouldn't want to work there either.
A good accountability culture should actually be pretty predictable. People know what's expected. They get feedback close enough to the problem to do something about it. A small issue doesn't get ignored for three months and then suddenly become the subject of an ass-chewing because the manager finally had enough.
Nothing drives good people crazier than a standard that only applies to the people conscientious enough to follow it.
You don't need more intensity to fix that. You need more consistency.
And if leadership does that consistently enough, something really valuable can start to happen: accountability stops being something the boss has to bring into the room every time there's a problem. The team starts protecting the standard too.
That's the culture I'd want.
The experienced employee can correct something with a new person before the foreman ever needs to get involved. A crew member can tell another crew member that the job isn't ready to pack up yet. A manager can get pushback from somebody on the team when they haven't followed through on something they committed to do.
And yes, that includes the owner.
A lot of us like accountability when the arrow is pointing down. A real culture of accountability has to be able to point up too.
Imagine having a team where somebody can come to you and say, respectfully, that you aren't doing what you said you were going to do, and your first reaction isn't to remind them whose name is on the building.
That's a strong team.
At that point, the manager isn't the only person trying to pull good performance out of everybody. Good people are surrounded by other people who expect good work and care enough to say something when the team starts drifting. That's when you can really start stretching the combined potential of the people you've hired.
So go back to the new employee we started with.
Imagine you hire somebody tomorrow who has more potential than anybody currently on your crew. Forget what the handbook says. Forget what you tell them during onboarding. For their first month, all they get to do is watch how your team actually operates.
At the end of those 30 days, what do they believe "good enough" looks like at your company?
That's the question I'd spend some time with.
Because if you don't like the answer, finding better employees isn't going to solve the whole problem. You can hire better than what you have today and still teach that person to operate at yesterday's standard.
At BR1, we spend every day helping companies find people who can make their teams better. I care a lot about hiring the right people. But getting a good person in the door is only part of the job. If you need help finding those people, that's where we can help. Just make sure that when they get there, the team they join doesn't train the best out of them.
Until next time, keep building your stronger team!