Remove C Players Immediately

Remove your C players immediately. Holding on to C players and tolerating C players is the number one reason that your A players are going to leave. So, I like to tell my team members, hey, whenever you identify a C player, and that means someone that doesn't live the core values and is not productive, it's not just productivity, and that's one thing I want to be really, really clear about. We're not talking about just someone's output, we're talking about their behavior and how they act within a team when we're talking about being a C player.

When you've identified someone that falls well beneath our standard of productivity and core values, we have to move on immediately. For a couple reasons. Number one, they're the number one reasons that our A players will leave. Again, we're on that, well, I always say we're on the 24 second NBA clock whenever we identify a C player because we have to be able to move on before it starts dragging the A players down.

Number two, there is very little chance of change. We're talking, when we're seeing C player change, it's only about 10 to 15% odds along lines of true human behavior change. It's not going to happen. We have to be able to move on from that person.

There's lots of stories I've heard people tell themselves over the years about why they should hold onto a C player. But I've never once in seven years heard the phrase, I should have held onto that C player longer. We always should have removed quicker before they could do more damage, before they could do more harm to the organization. Now, what's interesting as well, and this is something that people don't take into account, again, it's not just the human toll and the behavior that is affecting other people, it's actually affecting their output.

So for those CEOs that don't think one is, you know, that the human behavior part isn't as critical, the bottom line is also getting affected as well. And that's because the output of that team is inevitably drag down by usually around 30% and that is pretty consistent among clients. It doesn't matter what department, there's usually a 30% drag on whatever critical KPI output, numeric output that they own. So we've got to be able to move on from that C player as quickly as humanly possible.

And while it's difficult, it is less, it's difficult and we do care about people's livelihood in their lives, we want to be able to move on from them in a way that's consistent with our core values, get them into another role and job and even serve as a reference for them in the positive positive ways they were able to behave in the role, we cannot keep that person in our organization if they will not live by the core values and they will not be productive on a day-to-day basis. So please do yourself a favor and move on from your C players as quick as humanly possible.