As I was meditating in Atlanta’s famous Oakland Cemetery this morning (a favorite meditation spot of mine), I began thinking about the unfortunate reality of business leaders who hang on to the “DEAD” for far too long.  When faced with under-performance, they try fervently to resurrect qualities that may have never been present in particular staff members to begin with! 

Staffing decisions and work ethic often serve as a prime example of this behavior.  Every company has workers who qualify as "dead weight."  Sometimes these workers lack necessary skills and retraining is too costly, other times a shift in the corporate landscape has made a position irrelevant or redundant.  The unfortunate part is many leaders continue to carry this dead weight and end up hurting the company and the other employees in the process.

Why is this?  Why do you hold on to them so long?  We like to tell ourselves things like, “no one else knows that position”, or “at least he's a warm body”, or “well, she is doing some work,” and so on.  But the truth is, firing is emotional.  We make up loads of excuses to avoid the emotional part of doing what’s good for the company and ultimately, what's best for the people involved.

Problems I’ve seen resulting from holding on to dead too long.
1.  Wasted resources. You or other staff members are spending valuable time, energy, and resources lamenting challenges that have resulted from dead weight staff.  Try this: recalculate each salaried staff position, including yours, into an hourly rate.  How many hours (and therefore dollars) do you and your staff spend dealing with, cleaning up after, or worrying about the dead weight?  It becomes costly very quickly.

2. Distracted staff.  If others are distracted and annoyed or frustrated with the dead weight, they are NOT being creative or effective... more money down the tubes.

3. Lack of motivation.  Often staff becomes disloyal when they can clearly see that dead weight staff needs to be eliminated.  This is a HUGE profit thief.  Anything from stealing Post-its to surfing the net for hours a day negatively impacts the office atmosphere.  Your business will suffer if your team gets the idea that they no longer need to work hard because the dead weight worker never faces consequences for being a crappy employee.

Take Action! Ask yourself the following key questions:
Take stock of your staff.  Which one, two or three people drain your energy the most?  Who else are these energy thieves distracting?  Have you added any rules, policies or other bureaucracy in an attempt to control an employee?  

Listen, you don’t always have to fire the dead, sometimes they simply need systems to support them or perhaps a different position within the company.  Be creative first, fire second.  Either way, get rid of the dead weight, before the cancer spreads anymore!

Until next time, Shawn