From Phil in Sacramento
Dear Coach– my brother acts like he’s the hardest working guy in our business but the truth of the matter is he’s one of the laziest people in our business. I’m not sure where he gets his reality but I work much harder than he does, and really resent the fact that he thinks he works every bit as hard as I do. It’s causing resentment with me, and with my wife and others in the business. How should I handle this?
Answer:
Good question Phil. It always amazes me how people convince themselves that they are so hard-working. I get to work with a lot of different people and know the difference between hard-working people and people telling themselves they are hard-working. I guess in some way hard-working is in the eye of the beholder. For your brother he may actually believe that he really is working hard.
The key to high performance and a winning team is having clear performance expectations and benchmarks. Hours of work, work product produced, sales: you get the picture. The first thing you need to do is really begin to explore the measurements in the company. How do you measure your work product? How can you create a scorecard that will allow not only your brother, but also you and others to create a clear picture of your work product and outcomes?
The other problem is I see a lot of is people that work hard but don’t produce results that move the business forward. You need to begin to understand what those results look like and then slowly begin to build a culture of accountability and focus on results if your family business is going to be a championship team.
Let your brother flap his gums for the time being and slowly begin to focus the company on results and accountability and make yourself the first example of that. Your brother is probably kidding himself but no one has created the management systems to provide performance feedback and ultimately incentive compensation. Consider looking at our playbook exercises on doing performance reviews on each other. Until you can create clear performance expectations and measurements, your brothers can continue to tell everybody how hard he works.
In the meantime also try not to hate him for it. I know how annoying it can be and unfortunately it’s a little bit of human nature for people to think more highly of themselves than they should.
Get to work and create better measurements!
