How to Handle that Problematic Employee

I was talking with a gentleman the other day, actually, just this morning. It wasn’t even the other day. He. He has this classic problem, which I think a lot of us can relate to. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’ve probably been here. That he has this employee who is vital to the function of the business. However, this guy is toxic. He is resistant to the ideas coming from leadership.

They want to grow the business. This guy, pooh poos that. He talks crap to the other teammates, and this guy’s like, I’ve sat down with him. I’ve done one on one on one on ones with him and discussed the importance of, like, changing this behavior, but he still keeps doing it. And the problem this gentleman is having is he believes this guy is indispensable, that he has 40 years of experience in this particular industry, and that to get somebody of an equivalent skill set, if he was to hire them new and train them, it would take them four years of training to get to a comparable level of proficiency. And there’s just not very many people in this industry that he could go and replace this gentleman with. So that is the limiting belief he’s coming to this conversation with. But I think we can all understand.

We can all commiserate with us where you’ve had that one employee that you feel as though you’re a hostage to them. You feel like you don’t want them on the team, but you can’t afford to get rid of them, because that job, that function still needs to get done. You can’t imagine if they were to leave. You don’t know what you would do, right? And so the way that I frame this, because I went through the exact same thing back in 2016, 2017, when we were building escape, we were scaling the manufacturing side, and we had this gentleman who we thought was absolutely indispensable, at least for the size and where we were at that point. We had plans in the next six months that we were going to continue growing, get to the point of profitability, that we could afford to bring in somebody else into that position. But for now, he was filling a need. He was a band aid, and we knew that we’re like, it’s. It’s gonna have to be good enough.

And what we discovered, interestingly, is we kept working with this guy over and over. We’re trying to coach him up and try to, like, get him on the. Onto the same script as the rest of the team. Cause he was seen as a leader within the company. And we’re like, you can’t be talking shit. You can’t be, like, creating division amongst a team. You can’t be poo pooing these new initiatives that we’re bringing to everybody. We need you on board with this.
And we worked with this guy for months and months, and it was like banging our head against the wall. And every other day there was some new drama, and it was causing all sorts of downstream toxicity with the rest of the team. Morale was low, and we kept justifying it and saying, we’re going to figure this out. He’s not the long term solution. We know we need to replace him, but we’re just not quite there yet. And then one day, the decision was taken entirely out of our hands. He came to us and he quit out of the blue. After we had been bending over backwards to try and facilitate and make this thing work for him.
He just came and quit one day, and we were like, what? What the hell? Did not see that coming whatsoever. And overnight, we had to pivot, and we had to do something now, because it was no longer just about maintaining with the band aid on and saying, okay, we just need to limp along a little bit longer. Now the decision had been forced upon us. And what was so interesting is, in that moment, we rose to the occasion, when you have to solve a problem, you tend to solve it. Like, if the easiest way to solve it. So the easiest way to solve him before he had left was we would just keep limping along. The easiest way to solve the problem after he left because there was no other option was to replace him. And what ended up happening is we brought in this guy who was so far ahead of the first guy, that overnight the business transformed.
And it was all of a sudden like a rocket ship, simply because we got the wrong. Like, we had the wrong guy in the seat for so long, and it was creating so much tension and division amongst the team. When we finally got the right guy in there, the business took off. And we thought we were growing well before that. But what we realized is that we had been handicapping ourselves. And it’s so interesting, because we weren’t prepared to make the decision to get rid of this guy until it was foisted upon us. And so when I was talking to this gentleman yesterday, or this morning, rather, about his situation with his employee, I was like, what would you do if tomorrow, that guy came in and quit? What would you do if he got hit by a bus and he couldn’t come in? What would you do? I’m guessing you would either close up shop and say this just was a bad business or you would find a solution, right? If you can find a solution in that scenario, then you can find a solution in this scenario and understand that no person is irreplaceable. And if they are, then you don’t actually have a business.
You’re not actually a business owner. You’re simply a hostage. And so if you want to build a business, no single piece of the puzzle yourself, including as the founder, the CEO, whatever position you go by, nobody on the team is irreplaceable. And that might be the idea that limits most businesses from growing to their full potential, is the entrepreneur’s belief that they are irreplaceable, that nobody can do the job as well as they can, that they have some technical expertise that cannot be trained. It would take decades for somebody to gain the same capacity and competency that you have, and therefore, you’re stuck doing the deliverables into perpetuity. That is the limiting belief this gentleman has currently about his business and this guy within it. And the truth is, if that decision was taken out of your hands and that guy came tomorrow and quit, you would find a solution. It’s just right now, you’re leaning into the easiest solution, which requires you to not make a change, because the pain of change is still greater than the pain of staying the same.

Or at least that’s largely because you don’t understand the full amount, the full extent of the pain that you’re inflicting on yourself. You won’t see that until you get rid of this guy, bringing in the new guy. And then you can see the disparity between how much you were suffering before and how great it can be afterwards. Then you’ll look back in hindsight, be like, I wish I had done this sooner. And I share this with you because I have been on the opposite side of this many times. That was just one example from the escape climbing days. But there have been so many examples of this playing out in different businesses over and over and over again. Whereas, like, we drug our feet on letting a person go that we knew wasn’t a good fit.

And then ultimately, when we finally did it, the full extent of the damage they had been doing within the business became crystal clear. And we’re like, man, if we could go back, I would have done that six months sooner. So I’m telling you this, letting you know, if you have that person on your team right now, you know what to do. So go do it. That’s going to do it for me, guys. And gals. We’ll catch you here tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.