Do you fire someone who’s just okay at their job?
Introducing the Biggerstaff Box, the world's most offensive management tool
I recently debated with my boss what the correct threshold is for letting go of an employee who isn’t failing at their job but is also not moving the company forward as fast as we want. She and I had different takes on what to do about someone who’s just treading water. Her standard for employment is that the employee must make the company increasingly better. When pushing a flywheel, if you add another person, you expect that the flywheel keeps rotating faster, not just staying the same speed (even if the pushing gets a little easier for everyone else on the wheel). This is the kind of standard that leads to incredible organizations. Organizations where everyone is a pipe hitter (don’t read the Urban Dictionary version of that word, trust me). But it also means you’re only going to be able to hire people who’ve already proven themselves, which (a) means you’re restricted to folks with experience who probably cost a lot and (b) can limit the path of advancement for people in the organization who have promise but need coaching. Like any professional sports team, you can assemble a bunch of All-Stars, but you’re unlikely to keep them together for long and you’re going to pay a pretty penny.
I had a different opinion. I like investing in people who aren’t at that high a standard but show promise. It comes with more of a managerial burden but in exchange, you can get a lot of “diamonds in the rough”. My take is that it's not always necessary to fire someone who’s just okay at their job if they're still useful and productive, especially if they’re demonstrating a willingness to learn and grow. I reason that if you allow the employee to prove themselves and they take advantage of it, you could end up with someone who will become an asset to the company as well as extremely loyal. This makes for a great team that sticks together for multiple seasons vs. the All-Star team.
As we debated, it became clear that we saw a different set of responsibilities between the employee and their manager. My boss holds the individual accountable because, in her view, you are by default excellent at your job (and if you’re not, you don’t have a job with us). Whereas I found myself arguing that it wasn’t necessarily the fault of the individual if they weren’t succeeding in their role. Rather, it was the fault of their organization for placing them in that role and for failing to develop them to the standard expected of the job.
Now, this debate is a tale as old as time. But it reminded me of a similar debate from much earlier in my career.
Way back in my first or second year in the Army, I was a dumb little Lieutenant who thought he knew just about everything. I was debating something (I don’t remember the specifics) with my company’s First Sergeant, Tom Biggerstaff. Tom, going on 20 years in the Army, had trained thousands of young men and women throughout his career. A keen observer of human behavior with a razor-sharp tongue, Tom could cut to the core of issues with one blistering retort. He said something that day I’ve never forgotten:
“Sir, there’s nothing more dangerous than a highly motivated idiot”
As in, the biggest danger to an organization is someone who tries very hard but doesn’t know what they’re doing. Going very hard, in the wrong direction. By doing their best, they make the situation worse.
I’ve thought about what Tom said and today, I’m codifying these thoughts into what I’m calling “The Biggerstaff Box”. Behold!
Quick note - The evaluation of someone’s competence is relative to the role they are in. Plenty of folks succeed in one role but not in another because of the complexity of the role, their strengths and weaknesses, and the environment they work in. None of this is meant as an ad-hominem attack, I’m just being my typical wise-ass self and trying to make a dry topic more entertaining.
If you consider each person in the context of their performance in their job, you can evaluate them using a measurement of competency and motivation. Competency is how well they perform the tasks associated with their job. Motivation is how much effort and energy they put forth in performing those tasks.
If someone is competent and motivated, they’re a superstar. These are the people you build organizations around. They are the ones getting promoted year after year. You likely won’t keep them for long as they’ll outgrow your organization and/or company. But hot damn are they great when you’ve got them!
If someone is competent but not motivated, they’re clever. They do their job well but nothing more than that. They require little oversight but they aren’t going to go “above and beyond”. This makes them clever, as they have mastery of their job, making it easy to perform it while still being useful to the company. Win-win!
If someone is not motivated and not competent, they are a Minion (banana!). They have to be heavily managed and you can’t expect much from them. They do what they are asked to do but it’s not great work. The upside to this type of employee is you know exactly what you’re going to get.
If someone is motivated but not competent, they are an Enthusiastic Idiot. They have high management costs because they will go “above and beyond” but what they do is often wrong, which can be damaging and require re-work.
With his decades of experience managing well over a thousand soldiers, Tom was telling me something of the utmost importance: The employee that you have to watch out for, the one you need to get rid of as soon as you identify them, is the Enthusiastic Idiot.
Many of you are probably thinking it’s the Minion that has to go. Lazy AND incompetent? Get rid of them, they’re dead weight! And I would have agreed with you, as that was probably what I was arguing with Tom about all those years ago.
But that laziness isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Because if you don’t know what you’re doing, or you’re not very good at what you know how to do, you should do LESS.
Imagine a series of ridiculous events that leads to me being hired tomorrow as an engineer that works at SpaceX. I obviously know nothing about rocket engines yet it’s now that is my job and my new boss says something like “Cy, I need you to go recalibrate the power coupling on the turbo boosters” or something like that, idk what actually is in a rocket engine. What’s better - a Cy that just starts doing a lot of stuff because I’m eager to help despite not knowing what right looks like or a Cy that does the absolute bare minimum?
The less motivated Cy is the far better choice. Because while I haven’t made the power coupling of the turbo booster better, I also haven’t made it worse. Motivated Cy probably made it worse. This then causes a competent employee to come in and reverse my work when they could have been doing something else of value for the company.
Here’s another example. Back in 2011, Atlanta got hit by a “snowstorm” of a whopping 3 inches. Now, that’s considered a light dusting of snow for us northerners, but to a southern city like Hotlanta, that’s apocalyptic. The city’s two snow plows focused their efforts on ensuring the airport was accessible. So to clear more roads, the city repurposed its dump trucks, filling them with road salt. The idea was that the heavy trucks would be able to navigate the snow while distributing the salt, helping clear the roads. Small oversight - when they filled the trucks, they overloaded them to the point that they broke down shortly after starting their trips. Whoopsies.
Motivation to do the right thing? Absolutely. Competence at doing the thing? Absolutely not. So the city’s situation, which was already bad but didn’t have a bunch of broken-down garbage trucks, was now much worse than before.
Taking a macro view, this means that the guiding principle when evaluating someone across these two axes is that we prize competency over motivation. Work that is done well is worth more than work that is done eagerly.
This conflicts with a bias many of us have. We like action. We like seeing people try hard! Grinding it out! Putting in the work!
We equate effort with effectiveness. And so long as the person is competent, effort and effectiveness are correlated. But when they aren’t competent, the less effort, the better. The more an incompetent person does, the worse they make the company. And it’s a far greater negative impact than the positive one made by a competent employee. Because someone has to reverse the work done by the incompetent employee.
That’s what makes the Minion more valuable than the Enthusiastic Idiot - the lack of effort by the Minion is safer for the company. You know that they won’t go muck things up, and managerial oversight of them was always a given. Not great work but also no surprises. Whereas the Enthusiastic Idiot might fool less experienced managers who see their energy and effort and fall into that same bias, thinking “wow, this Cy sure does like his job and is running around helping out a lot! Sure, the quality of his work isn’t great but I bet we can help him improve, and then he’ll be a great contributor!”
Take for example the three employees now displayed in the Biggerstaff Box. Following our principle, it should be clear that #1 should stay, and #3 should go. #2… well now that’s the question, isn’t it? #2 is okay at their job.
But make no mistake. Enthusiastic Idiots gotta go. There’s no room for them in your team. It might hurt because they’re probably likable and may not understand feedback that their effort isn’t accretive to the team/org/company goals. After all, they have been taught like the rest of us that the best thing to do is try hard!
No one should ever think that management is easy. Don’t ask to be the leader if you’re not willing to pay the cost that comes with leading.
Now, obviously, the Biggerstaff Box is reductionist. We humans are complex, we contain multitudes. Super annoying, tbh. If you’re trying to reduce someone’s performance into one of these four quadrants, you’re at best having to distill a lot of variables and at worse cherry picking a few select aspects/characteristics. Undoubtedly by this point in the article, you’ve also blanched at my use of “Enthusiastic Idiot” and “Minion” because it’s insulting.
Keep in mind though that this is about the role someone is working in. I’ve been the enthusiastic idiot, the superstar, the minion, and the clever one. It’s all just a matter of how long I’ve been in the job and the amount of effort I put into it.
So use it as a guide, not a blueprint. And to give credit where it’s due, it’s not like Tom was the first person to ever make this observation. There are many of these “skill vs. will” or “competency vs. capability” matrixes out there, all of which are surely less insulting than the Biggerstaff Box (but again, you’re here for the memes).
This returns us to the original debate I was having with my boss. From my point of view, employee #2 in the example Biggerstaff Box should be kept, while my boss thinks employee #2 needs to go. Because to her #2, despite being okay at competency, still didn’t reach her standard. Might sound harsh, but she’s thinking of the company first, the individual second. The person was negatively impacting the organization and company due to their inability to crush it in their role. I was for giving the person time because they were showing increasing competency, arguing that with better management the person could develop the competency necessary to succeed. That the employee wasn’t a “true” enthusiastic idiot but rather a potential superstar that was being under-led.
Without question, both my boss and I are shaped by our previous experiences. With my time in the Army, I’m accustomed to getting very undeveloped young men and women who by necessity require a lot of managerial oversight and investment. Yet I’ve seen some of those 18-year-olds make life-or-death decisions in the blink of an eye that far outweigh the severity of decisions that most corporate managers will ever make. This makes me more open to the idea that it (a) takes time and help to turn people into superstars and (b) the raw talent needed for becoming a superstar is much more common than you’d think, it just takes lots of work to forge it.
Whereas my boss, having risen through the ranks of some of the world’s best technology companies, is accustomed to people having to deliver their best on day 1 because that’s the only way to keep growing, keep succeeding. The developmental infrastructure that the Army has for turning young adults into incredibly effective leaders is an unheard-of luxury that no corporation has. All that investment in trying to forge superstars out of raw material is time and money she’s never had. And by investing in that area, she’s not investing in areas that deliver value right now.
There’s value to both sides, for sure.
However, I’m the one in corporate America, she’s not in the Army. So while my time in the Army certainly molded my style of leadership, not adapting to my environment will cause me to fail. One consistent piece of feedback I’ve gotten since joining corporate America is that I “protect” my team. That feedback often frames the protection as a good thing but also highlights what problems it causes. It means that while I’m great at getting the best out of people because I invest heavily in developing them, I also can shield them too much from the ramifications of their actions. In essence, I excuse issues of competency by justifying via motivation. That the best I get out of people takes too long to get and that the “best” I get from others is best in relative terms but not absolute ones.
Exactly the sort of thing that Tom taught me not to do nearly 20 years ago. To not be okay with just okay, especially if it’s hidden behind enthusiasm.
When writing this article, I read a bunch about when to fire people. One that I found useful was this one from HBR. Boiling it down, it says to conduct an exercise with yourself: Pretend you are hiring your replacement and telling them what they should do on day 1. Which employees would you start making excuses for, justifying suboptimal behavior? Which ones would you hire again without even thinking about it and which ones would you ponder for a while?
In your gut, you probably know who isn’t performing at the level the team, organization, and company needs. The question then is: Do you have what it takes to be a competent leader and do what’s best for everyone else?
Are you not okay with someone who’s just okay?
Or are you maybe not in the quadrant of the Biggerstaff Box that you think you are?
Epilogue
There’s a lot of bias in this article. My work experience post-Army is at tech companies, either publicly traded or late-stage VC-backed. The public company was Amazon, which is the apex predator of capitalism and has thoroughly commoditized talent. While the VC-backed companies I work for don’t have Amazon’s talent bar (yet), they face serious pressure to deliver significant results in a short period. Hence, a very low tolerance for anyone on the lower half of the competency axis.
Other companies may not have the same level of pressure when it comes to employee performance management. The lifestyle businesses, family-owned ones, cash flow-positive ones, etc. may have more time on their hands or a greater margin for error and can spend the time forging less competent employees into superstars. Make no mistake though, the standard for competency is just there! It just varies from company to company for where it lies on the axis.
Great read sir! Makes me feel good to know i may have helped someone along the way. One thing ive learned after retirement, is most civilians think management and Leadership are one in the same. But people dont follow managers.