For most of you reading, you have heard others before throw caution at trying to use training as a solution to everything performance challenge. Statistically, training can only fix about 50% of performance challenges, because it only works when a skill is missing, or so underused that it is stale and needs to be refreshed.
Yet just because training is not an option for your current performance challenge doesn’t mean you ignore the poor performance.
I’d like you to ponder that last thought for a second, because most of the time we either try to slap training on a broken employee or we simply ignore the problem hoping it will go away. Both leave us with a performance challenge that only gets worse overtime.
Think about areas in your organization that probably would lead you to seeking an alternative solution to training:
- Unethical and/or morally corrupt Senior Management
- Unethical and/or morally corrupt Board of Directors
- Fraud, Lying, Spin
- Mismanagement of Assets
- Embezzlement
- Continual Harassment
- Lying to Auditors and/or Regulators
- Discrimination in Hiring Practices
- Discrimination in Promotions, Pay & Benefits
The list goes on, and in many cases when an organization is facing any one of these issues, they are often facing many at the same time. You see what they have in common is the need for Power & Control. Fighting these issues requires a more direct approach. And that approach is Termination of Employment.
Ridding the organization of corrupt people requires surgery to remove the cancer. No amount of treatment will cure the kind of depravity that allows an employee to misbehave in these ways. And before my HR friends start jumping down my throat for such a harsh approach, let me remind them that training rarely can change character traits permanently.
So the next time someone wants you to have Senior Management go through an Ethics Workshop, suggest they talk with HR & an Employment Law Attorney about termination of employment as the solution. And should the Board of Directors be the problem, it is time to get your regulators involved to remove them.
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