@bbqcravings
When you fire your Ronaldo
Podcast Key Note
NOT A TEAM PLAYER
Now, my Ronaldo is like one man army – like everyday he’s at work early, he’s the last person to leave, he holds the key and he runs everything – Front of House, Back of House operations, purchases/market; everything and he never complains; he didn’t take time off and, there were days he worked six days straight with no day off, no time off, no shift, nothing.
He was always the first one in and last one out. Other guys will walk in and complain how they work long hours even though they get 2 days off; he never did that. But then, I started realizing he became a weak point for me because he was more of a bottle neck because of how he shows up and how serious he was delivering his tasks. I valued that more than the quality of work he was putting in.
But any moment I hired someone like a new management member, he would always have issues with them, initially I didn’t care because he delivered more. Eg,. I hire a new manager right now and after like 2-3 months she quits; I’ll be like well obviously she was not really the right person for the job if so she would have stayed on; and me keeping My Ronaldo or favoring him is because he delivers. He outworks every other employee.
There were times I hired managers and they were almost okay with him doing the entire job whereas they were paid more and I’d think this is the reason I need him, not this ‘manager’ that is just posing around and getting paid.
I now realized that My Ronaldo was almost sabotaging opportunities created to just secure his position. I took offense to that because the new employees made us better as a team. We had team meetings, more training on communication and things like that yet he still wasn’t getting it.
Listen to the podcast
“Ronaldo might be the one scoring all the goals, but others have to give him the right passes; the goal keeper makes sure their opponents don’t score on them” . So it’s only team that can survive. In a team, each person must have their own role that they execute excellently. So if one person doesn’t want to share and function very well in a team, them he is liability to your business no matter what, you have to make changes. When you make those changes, it’s going to cost you because you are taking away a huge stability and years of experience.
People worry that staff leaving means business secrets and other information walk out with them it’s bound to happen but shouldn’t be enough reason to keep a staff. It has to be – does this staff function in a team? When objectives are changed, does he fall in line?
So lessons that I have learnt from this is having team players. I don’t care if it’s all star staff or not; but what I care about is that there has to be a team and once the captain decides on strategy to move with, everybody must align with that. If your management team do not align, each moment there’s misunderstanding, it gives a lot of disadvantage and team begins to sabotage each other and their subordinates begins to undermine their authorities. Leadership has to be earned; it is not just by position alone.
Key Takeaway Points:
- Sometimes you might have to let go of your best employee(s) if they are not team players
- Team always beat individual efforts
- Make sure you have multiple players in similar positions because things might happen and you don’t want to lose momentum
- If you have an all star employee, that’s fantastic but he can’t be the only all star in your team
- Build a strong balance team over an individual effort – with a strong team, you can win.
- Leadership has to be earned; it is not just by position alone.
- look out for Sabotaging behavior from your management team
- Roles must be clearly defined
- Ensure management close when they should and take days off, it will exposes weaknesses if there are
- Ronaldo might be the one scoring all the goals, but others have to give him the right passes; the goal keeper makes sure their opponents don’t score them – team work.
