A consultant really upset me once when they told our senior team that we had a bunch of sh!t people.
I remember feeling viscerally upset by the comment.
Because – and I said (although perhaps only less eloquently) – there’s no such thing as sh!t people in the workplace.
There is bad behaviour.
There are bad fits between people and roles.
There is bad culture.
Bad engagement.
And bad systems of work.
But – ultimately – the presence of anything we might describe as systematically sh!t in an organisation points to one thing.
Bad management.
Because it’s management who employs these people in the first place. Who coaches them. Who agrees their priorities. Who creates and maintains the system within which they work. Who performance manages them (or – as they case often is – doesn’t performance manage them).
And who chooses whether or not to allow a person to keep their role or not.
None of this is to say that employees shouldn’t be responsible for their poor behaviour and performance. They should be.
But it’s a manager’s task to manage them effectively.
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