I have been tuned in to Patrick Lencioni’s podcasts lately and I have come across one where he mentions the truth that you will have to face the fact that you will hire really bad, rotten people in your team and it’s inevitable. Thoughts start popping into my head – and as the CEO and founder of the most dominant SEO Services agency in the Philippines, I felt compelled to lay down my thoughts here.
If you will go and look for the root definition of the word “entrepreneur” you will find that it means “One who undertakes risk.”
That is exactly what you will be doing in every sense of the word. Yes it may be a more calculated risk but it would still be a risk nonetheless. And this risk is present in all respects of your business – especially in the one most un predictable aspect of it: PEOPLE. Specifically, employees.
There will hardly be any problems that you will receive in any other facet of your business than in the areas where employees are directly involved. This is true for any business, anywhere in the world.
Patrick Lencioni mentions the idea that you have to completely accept the risk that you will hire some bad people who will care more about themselves than others in the team. Because if you do not accept this at the get-go, you will do a big disfavor to yourself and the rest of the people in your organization.
Airports are one of the places in the world that is super duper strict on their protocols before you board a plane. This is because they check for the unlikely terrorist or drug smuggler. Out of the millions of people who check in to airports, there are extremely few who are actual terrorists that intend to do catastrophic harm to others.
However airports are one heckuva place in their checks in order to prevent this extremely small chance that a terrorist will board. Making it such a hassle for the average traveler to go through things and board their plane with ease.
As a business owner and leader, it is hard for us to always think like the airport security. Yes we should have systems to prevent a really bad employee from boarding our team but at the same time we have to give 100% trust to employees that we hire and onboard.
“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them” – Ernest Hemingway
Because if you don’t do this and you will be as paranoid as you can be, then you’re going to take the hit long-term.
You’re going to have to raise a sub-par team who you won’t be willing to train and give enough of your life to. It’s going to be a team that you won’t trust, and you won’t invest in their growth, skills and knowledge . You will have to live with a team that is just going to be average.
And if your team is just going to be average, then your business is just going to have to be average.
Instead, accept the fact that you will have to hire someone who will betray you and stab you where it hurts and they will intend to leave a trail of dead bodies in your organization as they leave. You just have to write this off as bad debt in your balance sheet. It will hurt a lot more than a bad debt for sure but the consequences of not accepting this fact and protecting yourself thoroughly against it is a lot more dire.
