Hire, Train, Motivate, & Terminate
by Rob Redmond - July 4, 2007
Leaders who are taking over or starting up new organizations are often given the old refrain “Groom or broom.” This slogan comes from sometime in the 1950’s and is the simplest of management principles. Either your people are worth keeping and training to be better, or they will never provide return on your investment and need to be moved out before you waste any more time and energy on them.
If someone isn’t working out, you have to have the guts to fire them. To keep them around can be poisonous for the morale of the overall organization. Managers who are afraid to fire people or do not have the power to fire people are doomed to manage mediocre organizations which are continually weighed down by people pulling in the wrong direction.
A Karate instructor with a room full of students may not see the relevance of this principle to his job running a Karate club, but it is entirely relevant. There are a lot of situations in a Karate club that mirror the management scenario of hiring people, getting the best from them, and getting rid of them if they don’t work out. We Karate instructors just don’t know anything about it and don’t face up to it.
In this article, I will review my own management principle of hire, train, motivate, and terminate, which expands upon the old groom or broom concept. Those of you in management positions will find it highly relevant. Those of you who are Karate instructors can find great value in this concept if you learn to see what you do as essentially a management activity.
A Top Performer: McDonald’s in Japan
I don’t like Japanese food. I am a steak and potatoes man. So it is no surprise that I spent some serious time in McDonald’s during the two years I was living in Nagoya. I probably bought enough in cheeseburgers while living there to put a down payment on a personal parking space for the store manager of the Sakae restaurant in Nagoya.
McDonald’s in Japan is nothing like McDonald’s in the United States.
Their people are trained to welcome you on every entry into their stores. They are trained to thank you three times before you walk out the door. They run behind the counter. Ladies and gentlemen, I mean they run as in they are never moving at less than a jog. The food is brought to your table if there is any wait for it. They do not ask you to step aside. They invite you to find a table and they bring your food to you and thank you for your business and apologize for the wait.
McDonald’s achieves this level of service in Japan because they hire, train, motivate, and terminate. McDonald’s in Japan is a top performing organization that provides a consistently amazing customer service experience across the board.
Hire
Managers are entirely dependent upon the people they lead for their success. A manager can write policy manuals, hold cookouts, give speeches, hold training sessions, and otherwise drive themselves crazy managing, but if their people do nothing, then the manager’s results are nothing as well.
Therefore, every manager wants to have as good of a team as possible, since his team’s performance is basically his performance.
In order to build a good team, a manager must have people who can perform. And the first thing a good leader does is recruit people who are top performers who already have the abilities he needs. For a manager, this means hiring. Managers all too often hire the first person who is not totally unworthy who walks through the door. They might interview three people and then simply end the painful interviewing process by grabbing someone up to cover the work that is sitting around without anyone to do it.
This is a terrible mistake.
Effective hiring is absolutely essential to the success of a manager. In fact, hiring is so important that it is, without a doubt, first of the four most important things that any manager does. A good leader spends quite a lot of time patiently searching for the right candidate, sifting like a miner panning for gold through endless potential recruits until finally that golden nugget appears. There is quite a bit written already about effective interviewing techniques and good hiring habits. I’ll leave that to the many books written about it.
Effective hiring involves finding people with as many abilities as you could possibly make use of. Hiring people who are very strong at the core competencies demanded by their job is the best way to get the right people on board. That means that you will have people who are somewhat flawed or lacking in other areas. To avoid this, always hire the strongest candidate, not the safest. The safest will stink at everything, the strongest will kick butt at his core ability and the rest you can deal with through training. Be patient. The right person is out there.
Train
Once you have hired people, the training process begins. Organizations that bring people on and put them into new roles without putting them through training are foolish. All of the great organizations are famous for drowning their people in training. The more training, the better your people will be. When you fail to train your people for how to perform their jobs successfully, they tend to try to figure out how to do things on their own and by leaning on their peers. This creates a rather large training burden amongst your team. It is all too common these days for a newcomer to an organization to simply be asked to join in with everyone else and pick things up as they go. No one can be surprised with what a lousy performing group it is later.
Motivate or Terminate
After people are hired and trained, people will either perform well or they will not. If they are not performing well, they might need more training if they do not know what to do. However, let’s assume you have trained these people effectively, but they are still not performing. If that is the case, there are only two possible things that could be wrong. Either your mediocre performers are unmotivated to improve their or they are incapable of improving their performance.
For those that are unmotivated, it is the leader’s job to provide motivation. Positive motivation works well in some cases. Continually giving positive feedback to people who do the right things when they do the right things is a classic leadership technique that works well. Providing rewards and incentives works well too. An old adage says, “Try to catch your people doing things right.”
Sometimes your people will fail to provide you with opportunities to reward their occasional or accidental incidents of good performance. For them, feedback that asks that they change their behavior is important. When feedback fails repeatedly, a sit-down discussion with the drawing of boundaries is necessary. When drawing a boundary, inform the person that if they fail to do A or if they do B again, that certain consequences will result. Stick to your boundary and fulfill the promise of consequences should the person so warned cross it.
At some point, every leader must decide if training and motivation are now excessive and not producing results. When that point as been reached, it is the duty of the manager to remove the incapable person from their organization and replace them with a new sequence of hiring, training, motivation, and termination.
Seniority
If there is one pattern I have noticed as a Karate club instructor and a manager, it is that people who have been in an organization a while expect deferential treatment simply due to the fact that they have a long tenure. But an effective leader will ignore tenure utterly and will focus on the value that the person brings to the organization.
Human beings long for security, and when people say, “But I have been a member for ten years, why aren’t I in charge?”, the answer should be swift, direct, and honest.
“Leadership positions are determined by performance, not tenure. You are in competition with others who also want the position. Perform, and you will be rewarded. Fail to perform, and no longer how long you are here, you won’t get anywhere.”
Relevance to Karate Club Management
If you read this far, you are now wondering how a Karate instructor can use this information to succeed on the job, perhaps. Maybe you don’t think that you can perform any of these functions except training and motivation, and that hiring and firing are beyond you.
Consider several situations where this applies directly to your job:
Office staff - If you operate a commercial school, having inexpensive staff who answer the phone while you are teaching classes is required, otherwise you will send every one of your future customers to voice mail and lose quite a few of them due to failure to engage when they call you. Be careful in your hiring. Do not hire friends or family for this job, because you might be disappointed with the performance of the person you put in this position and need to fire them later. Never hire friends and family unless you are prepared to fire them ruthlessly when they fail to perform.
Assistant instructors - Never award this position to your “top student” because of tenure or belt rank, and never simply allow them to assume the job. If you are going to have an assistant instructor in your club, and I recommend you think carefully about it before you make a decision there, go through careful consideration of who you want doing this job. It should not be a reward for frequent attendance, butt kissing, and long years of membership. The assistant must be someone that can perform as an instructor and inspire others to train, and they must be someone you are willing to drown in training on how to instruct. You must also be willing to give them continuous feedback and if necessary, remove them from the position even if it means they will quit. If you aren’t willing to do that, then don’t have assistants.
Club Members - Sometimes a club member will present more of a hassle than they are worth. You might think it is your solemn duty to never give up on people thanks to watching endless hours of idealistic and unrealistic television shows, but the truth is that some people are just crummy, and as long as they are present, they bring down the morale and potential of your Karate club. Your duty is not to endlessly struggle to force-fit people to conduct themselves well in your Karate class. Your duty is to train, motivate, and then when that fails after a couple of tries, terminate. Pull them aside, explain that you are sending them home, and they are not to return.
New Members and Visitors - Train your new students - not in Karate - but in how to behave in your Karate club. Tour them around the club, and spend some time teaching them how you expect them to behave. If a more senior level person is going to visit your club, require them to come early and get a 30 minute training session on behavior so that they do not disrupt your class. Training is not just in Karate techniques, but also in how to behave as a functional and valued member of the Karate class.
Again, when a visitor or new member fails to adapt, motivate them to adapt. When that fails, move them on out, and let them know it isn’t working.
Too many Karate instructors are afraid to kick bad members out of their Karate clubs. They have convinced themselves that these people add diversity or some other sort of value, but the truth is that a complainer who has a bad attitude and irritates the other members of the club is like a virus or poison in your club’s system, and your job as the leader is to heal your club - through surgery if necessary.
Karate instructors and most managers have one thing in common: they are afraid to do their jobs because they want to be loved, admired, and popular. If your priority is popularity, then leadership is not for you. Being a leader means taking responsibility for the group that you lead, and sometimes that responsibility is to sacrifice your own happiness and comfort for the good of your organization.
Hire, train, motivate, and terminate. Your students who are willing to respond to training and motivation will thank you for doing your job. You probably have no idea how much complaining goes on in the parking lot about your own incompetence at leading your club effectively. They complain about the smelly guy you will not send home for not bathing, they complain about the club bully that you allow to visit because he is your old friend or your instructor! They complain about you allowing someone to teach just because they have been around a long time when all the students know that someone with less tenure has more talent in their little finger.
This complaining is your organization’s meter of morale. You are not tapped into it, so you might not be conscious of just how ineffective your practices are. I’m not suggesting you manage per the complaint box. I certainly do not. But be aware that a soft-hearted leader who has no willingness to confront people and do the hard part is no leader at all.
» Manager Tools run by Mark Horstman and Mike Auzenne remains the best web site ever for management advice. Karate instructors and leaders of all kinds: Go there, listen, and learn.
» Assistant instructors are not there to free up your time. Just the opposite, in fact. Learn how to make them.
» Feedback is a communication technique to better enable you to express yourself and get positive results from those around you. Like the idea? See the link above to Manager Tools.
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