Why Are Good People So Hard to Find?
Sep 16, 2024
You started your business, had some success, and now you need to add people to your team. Or, maybe you’ve been at this for a while, you’ve had some turnover, and it’s starting to feel hopeless, like you’ll never be able to find people you can trust that will stick around. In this episode of Leadership is Feminine, host Kris Plachy answers the question: why are people so hard to find?
Of course it would be great if employees showed up on time, never missed a deadline, and fulfilled the expectation of their roles, but that’s not realistic. For many leaders, this can lead to a lot of drama and blame, but instead, Kris invites leaders to look within. What if we could rely on ourselves and trust that we will follow through on upholding the expectations we agreed to?
This episode explores how a lack of accountability plays a major role in frustrations between leaders and their employees, and how important it is for team members to understand what success looks like in their roles. "The difficulty in finding 'good people' often stems from leaders not being clear or consistent in their expectations and communications."
Kris shares that open dialogues between leaders and employees to align goals, resources, and timelines, empower teams for success. And she acknowledges the significance of trust, communication, and well-defined role clarity in performance resolution, highlighting these elements as fundamental to effective leadership.
Join Kris for this honest and eye-opening episode as she challenges leaders to shift their perspective on accountability and team dynamics. Discover how clarity, trust, and open communication can transform your team and empower you to find the right people who align with your vision and goals.
Key Takeaways From This Episode
- Clarifying Expectations: The need for leaders to facilitate clarity so employees can understand what success looks like in their roles.
- A Leader’s Responsibility to Hold Employees Accountable: Consequences of a lack of accountability.
- Trust in Leadership: Trusting oneself to manage expectations, outcomes, and managing unmet expectations.
- Addressing Failure and Poor Performance: Importance of open dialogue and addressing issues directly and constructively.
- Self-Awareness in Leadership: Trust and confidence in oneself to handle team management and difficult conversations.
- The Ongoing Nature of Hiring and Firing as a Part of Business: Learning and correcting from unsuccessful hires as a part of leadership.
Contact Information and Recommended Resources
Get Access to LEAD LESSONS
Lead for Women is now open for advanced registration! Sign up now thru September 18th and join Kris LIVE on October 9th for 8 weeks of Lead for Women Lessons and real-time advisement to get that difficult team member issue solved. Go to www.thevisionary.ceo/nextstep to learn more details.
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Transcript
Kris Plachy:
Okay. Hello and welcome to Leadership is Feminine podcast today. I'm Kris Plachy, and I'm so happy that you're here to tune in. I have my new Leadership is Feminine shirt on. Is this so cute? If you're not watching the video, you can find it on lots of different places, but primarily YouTube or the social medias, I don't know, lots of different places. We post it. But if you don't have a Leadership is Feminine shirt or sweatshirt or a t shirt or a tumbler or coffee mug, you should get one because they're really beautiful and fun. And I love the statement. But enough about the merch.
Kris Plachy:
Let's talk about something that I think is very real and important for us to be addressing. And that is the very real, very true, very frustrating, very overwhelming issue of not being able to find good people. Why is it that great team members are so hard to find? Now, I have a lot of answers to that question, but there's one in particular that I think is the most important one we can talk about today. And I want to keep it simple, and it's because you have all the control over it. One of the things that happens when we start to hire people to come work in our company, in our business, is we start to lose a feeling of control, right? When it's just us and we know how to do everything, et cetera, et cetera. If that's the way that most of you I know that listen to this have sort of started, and then your business grows, you have to add people and you start to lose control.
Kris Plachy:
And that's mostly true - control over what they do. You can't control what other people do, nor should you ever want to try. Let's take that off the list. But what also happens is that what you used to be really good at, you now need to help other people be good at. And that is not always the core strength of a visionary. The core strength of a visionary, a woman who sees a future that doesn't exist yet, is that she sees a future that doesn't exist yet. And she knows deep in the soul of her humanness that she can figure it out and make it happen. But as soon as she has to try and get someone else to understand it and do it, she feels helpless.
Kris Plachy:
Because you start to feel unheard, misunderstood. You might start to think that your expectations are too high, especially when people can't understand what you want, or they don't give you what you think you see in your head. And so it just starts this spiral, and this is where a lot of the work that I do with my clients really enters. Because what once was easy for you to do and maybe easy for you to do with one or two people, but now that you've built the business and it's bigger, it's getting really complicated, it's getting harder, and you're really frustrated. And so what I want to talk to you today about is about trust. I think that trust is an interesting word. When we think about trust, it can be feeling, I trust you. I can feel trust towards you.
Kris Plachy:
I can have a thought about you that I think you are trustworthy. "I trust you," is a thought. It could be an action. To be trustworthy is something I do that I believe emanates or demonstrates my trust. It could even be the result of something I could say, "Well, now there's trust because this person took this action," which is still ultimately a thought. So trust is, I believe when I talk to my clients and I talk to so many of you out there in the world, it's the thing that you want most is to trust. You want to trust that what you're asking for is delivered. You want to trust that people are committed to your business, to you, to what you're trying to achieve.
Kris Plachy:
You wanna trust that they're using their time wisely, that they have a good work ethic, that they are not, you know, wasting your time or your money. You wanna trust that they're gonna make the best decision for the client or the customer. You wanna trust their judgment, you wanna trust their reliability, right? There's a lot of things that, that I hear people say. And because so many of us have just worked in this small world of ourselves and maybe one or two other people, there's a lot of trust, right? And even though we make mistakes, oftentimes we trust ourselves to fix it or figure it out, because we know we have assumed all the risk, we're going to figure it out because that's who we are, right? But we don't trust other people. And it doesn't take much to not trust someone anymore. Especially what I've noticed with entrepreneurs. Somebody starts coming into late to work, we stop trusting them. Somebody we notice, you know, said they did something, but they didn't, we stopped trusting them. Somebody we think gets it and is all in, and then they kind of act weird or off, and then we stop trusting them.
Kris Plachy:
And as soon as trust is gone, from your perspective, I think even you could start to sabotage that relationship because your patience around rebuilding trust might be limited.So I want to give you another way to think about it. If we know that we hire people to deliver a result, and if we know that in order for someone else to be able to deliver the result that we expect, we have to be able to communicate that result, make clear that result, show the result, get as close to what that looks like to them as possible, then I would say that the biggest gap in trust is not necessarily with them. It's within you. And the trust that you have of yourself to execute on whatever needs to happen when the result isn't achieved. So let me explain. Let's say you hired Jim and Jim's job was to finish these four projects by Friday. So you write Jim's job description, you write with Jim the goals. You delegate, transfer ownership for the tasks.
Kris Plachy:
You explain the result. You show him what success looks like. You're all on board, everybody's done all the things, you've done everything you think you're supposed to do to help Jim be able to do what's necessary to deliver the result on Friday. Friday rolls around and Jim does not produce any result. His four projects are not completed immediately. What I hear is that Jim is no longer trustworthy. I can't trust Jim. I did all this, I wrote his job, I set up his goals, delegated, I explained it to him, I trained him, I worked with him, I had him work with Susie like I did all these things, but he didn't get it. So I don't trust Jim.
Kris Plachy:
Now in that scenario, you not trusting Jim, we have a problem because Jim still works here and Jim still gets paid. Even though Jim didn't deliver a result, your trust in Jim becomes almost irrelevant because what's the issue? What's the consequence for Jim? Maybe nothing. And so when I talk about trust in the way that I just defined it, what if instead of we didn't, for lack of a better word, bother ourselves with trusting Jim?What if instead we decided to trust ourselves to follow through on upholding the expectation that Jim agreed to. So instead of being mad at Jim that he didn't do what we asked him to do, instead what we do is we address the fact that Jim didn't meet his projects and we tell Jim exactly what needs to be done, and by when, to meet the expectation that has now already been surpassed or not met. And we trust ourselves for what we will do. Now, instead of concerning ourselves with whats wrong with Jim, why don't we concern ourselves with the question? Jim didn't meet the expectation what will I do? And we trust ourselves to do that thing. Will I reassign it? Will I ask Jim to get it done by the end of the day, whether he has to stay late or not, will I tell Jim I'm pulling him off that project and I'm going to bring someone else in? Will I write Jim up? Will I let Jim go?
Kris Plachy:
Maybe Jim's a contractor and he didn't deliver at all. I'll just not renew the contract. I'll let him go. You have a lot of options. You don't have to fire everybody who misses a project. But I think the problem here, if you completely trusted yourself to know that you are not at the mercy of other people, if you empowered yourself enough to know that regardless of what happens with Jim, I'm going to figure out a solution and it's not going to be me doing it. If we built an organization around knowing that I am not answer all the time, so we remove the potential for you amassing all this resentment and all this burden and all this anger towards people because they can't deliver.
Kris Plachy:
And we shifted to, I am a woman who clarifies expectations, who writes very clear goals, who ensures that people have the resources, the know how, the tools, the understanding of what needs to be done that she addresses and delegates properly so people have a full sense of their ownership, that she reviews, gives feedback and addresses when that isn't met and when it is. What if I trusted myself implicitly that I will not sit and wait and hope that they get it right, and then be furious or mad or disheartened when they don't? But instead, I will clearly define what it looks like to get it done, and then I will trust myself to resolve whatever the outcome. I think that part of the issue that good people are hard to find, and I addressed this a little bit in the bonus podcast I did last week, is that we do have an accountability crisis I think in general, everywhere. I mean, all you have to look at is this country right now, and it's telling how much people have to choose to not believe our legal system, when somebody they prefer is held accountable for their behavior. How dismissive we become of our own accountability, and yet how determined we are that some others should be held accountable when we don't want them out on the streets or out doing whatever it is they do. That's a very large example, but we have that at the small level, too, right? Well, I can go down this one lane road and nobody else is here. Nobody's gonna.
Kris Plachy:
Right. But if you do go down that one lane road the wrong way and you get caught, are you furious about it? Some people would be. I watch people all over the town I live in run red lights and red stop signs in really nice fancy cars. I have a feeling in a different neighborhood, in a different kind of car, there'd be a lot of accountability if you ran through a red light or stop sign. Accountability can't be based on perspective and it can't be based on opinion, because performance is not an opinion. And as long as we're really clear about what the rules are, the expectations are, the agreements are, then what's the problem? Addressing it. So if I trusted myself implicitly to say, "Hey Jim, here's the thing.
Kris Plachy:
I gave you the job description, I gave you the goals, I went through it all, we transferred ownership. I made sure that you understood what your responsibilities were. I provided the resources, I provided the feedback, I gave you the tools. Everything was due today, Friday, and nothing is on my desk. That's a problem, Jim, because you've been hired to achieve this result and you didn't. Now it's something personal. I don't have anything against you." I don't have any reason to be mad at Jim. Why Jim's going to do whatever Jim's going to do.
Kris Plachy:
I'm going to do what I know is right for my business. But see, what happens to so many of us is we get mad at Jim for making us be the one who has to address it, for making us have to hold him accountable. He's an- why should I have to do it? Well, I mean, have you watched adults in the world? There's a lot of people who don't do what they say they will do. And there's a lot of people who breach agreements, social agreements, legal agreements, citizen agreements, every day. So that belief system that just because you're paying them money, they should do what you want to, but if you are paying them to deliver a result, and you've been crystal clear about what that result is, then you shouldn't have any problem addressing it. So the reason that it's hard to find good people is we do have an accountability crisis. We have people at every walk of life who really don't, haven't ever really felt the actual implications of being held accountable. I do believe that that is true because it hurts when you fail and it hurts when you make a mistake and it hurts when you don't deliver what somebody thought you were going to do.
Kris Plachy:
We have way too many people pleasers and control freaks on the planet to know that there's people who just are avoiding accountability, they're just not being held accountable because people don't want to make them feel bad. "Oh, it's fine, Jim. It's not a problem. You know what? I'll take, I'll take care, I'll take it from here. Don't worry about it. I didn't have any plans over the weekend.
Kris Plachy:
I'll just work all weekend and get it done." Meanwhile, you do that and you see the all weekend. Because Jim is the, you know, the nexus for all of your fury. He is the point of where you're just so frustrated. Because if Jim had just done his job, then I could have done whatever, right? No, that's the problem. But the more we let the Jim's of the world and the Rhonda's and the Carol's and the Lucy's and the Brendan's and the Melanie's and the Tiffany's and the Brandy's and the Joyce's and the whatever's - not trying to pick on anybody's names - the more we compensate because they didn't deliver, the more we perpetuate this problem. So what is the reason why we can't find good people? Because we are not doing the part inside that develops, how we trust ourselves to handle it.
Kris Plachy:
We think they should come to us and be perfect. We think they should come to us and be able to do it all. No, and the second part of that, because we want to just hire people. We want it to just be easy. And we don't want to have to think about what we think about in our brain to get something done. Because, I can speak to this so personally, this is what I struggle with so much. I see what I want and I don't know how to explain it to someone.
Kris Plachy:
And so then I just get super frustrated and I either don't bother with it or I try and figure it out myself. This is my conundrum. So I know there's others of you who go through this because I've talked to you about it. So what ends up happening is you're actually with Jim not really clear. He knows he has these four things due on Friday, but he also has this other stuff due and his job description doesn't exist, not really. And there's not really very clear goals. And you haven't actually made sure he has the resources.
Kris Plachy:
You've sort of talked about it and pointed him in different directions to say, "Oh, well, you can get it here, you can do that". And then you probably have also not made what success looks like very clear. He doesn't really know how to win. He doesn't have a picture of what that outcome is. And so then when he doesn't deliver, of course he didn't. Even if he gave you all four projects, they're probably not what you want. And then we go back through this circle again.
Kris Plachy:
Right, but do you trust yourself? Do you trust yourself to go to Jim if he doesn't do it, or he gives you not what you wanted and say, "Hey, this isn't what I was asking for, can we go through it again? I don't know if I did a good job." Do you trust yourself to recalibrate? Do you trust yourself to own it? Do you trust yourself to explain it again? Do you trust yourself to let Jim try again? Or do you just want to be frustrated with Jim that he can't read you? Either way, Jim's going to fail and then you're going to be looking for another person.Some cases that's what needs to happen is we got to let Jim go. Other cases, it's because we haven't done the work. So we haven't built the trust in ourselves that we could ever hire someone to do what we want because we haven't invested enough in being clear enough in what we do actually want. It's a challenging thing, but from my perspective, this is where you have the most control. How clear is it to win in your company? For every person that works for you, do they know what success looks like? And if you don't know, then here's actually what I would ask you to do instead. Whatever that thing is that you have each person working on,
Kris Plachy:
so maybe you have an accounting bookkeeper person, and you have a marketing person, and you have a client, customer service, sales facing person. You might have a product person. You guys all have different people. Let's ask. Just go have a meeting with one of them and ask them, "Hey, Jim from marketing, do you know how to win? Do you know what the ultimate result is that you're here to deliver?" And let's see if what he says is what you think it should be.Another question you could ask is, "Hey, Jim, these four projects are due next week or two weeks from now. Can you walk me through what success looks like, how you know if you've won, if you've done an exceptional job, what resources you need, what tools you need, what your benchmark goals are to hit the long term outcome of the project, and anything else you might need for me to make that be successful?" What if you had that conversation?
Kris Plachy:
I want you to think about what level of trust and confidence you need to have in yourself to be able to have that conversation with Jim, because here's what's true.I was just talking to my CFO this morning, and we've just added a new partner to my team to support with marketing. And I said to her, so now there's basically, there's four of us driving the core operations of my business. And I said, I now feel like I'm working with a bunch of adults. And I don't mean that age wise, I mean it as there's this camaraderie, clarity, honesty, support in what we're all doing that is just magic. And I've had the luck of the draw a lot of times with teams, so much so that that's why I like to do what I do, because I think I am kind of good at it. I've made bad hires.
Kris Plachy:
I know there's been people who've said yes who think I was a bad boss to work for. I get it. That's okay. It's part of the process. But I hold very dear and very true that I am never held hostage. I am never back against the wall with any person on the team. I trust that I can figure it out.
Kris Plachy:
But I want to give people who I work with as good of a shot as any to win. And that's on me, to be clear, to think about it, to back it up. If we didn't get it right to mea culpe that. Just say, I did not get that right. I messed up here. I could have spent, been more clear. I can see why this isn't what I asked for and try again. But if we get to that hiring PTSD and you've tried too many times and you just are so frustrated that people just can't figure it out. They're adults.
Kris Plachy:
Why can't they just figure it out? We have to turn this thing around and look at you, momma. Which is good news, because that's a solvable problem, right. That's exactly what I do in my Lead for Women program, is help you see where your gaps are. That doesn't mean that miraculously everybody that works for you is going to be better. It actually could mean that we'll really tell the truth for the first time that you've been tolerating and sort of substandard operating your business, right, with people who can't deliver what you want. That's okay, too. But let's figure it out, eh?Let's get it cleaned up so that we begin to hire people at a new level with maturity and trust, with clarity, defined around success and what success looks like, the results that you're here to do, not just your opinion, not just your exhaustion and needing help, not just like you're- "Here. Take it.
Kris Plachy:
Figure it out, please. I can't think about it anymore." I get why you feel that way, but that actually erodes your own self trust over time. Because the less you give people to be prepared to win, the more you will know that you can't trust yourself to help people win. And then nobody will win. And you'll just keep turning that door over and over again. So the first step is, if I have someone on this team - this is what we do in the first week of lead - we do a triage and we do an audit, we do team design, and we really evaluate. Okay, what's true about the role this person's in, the results this person is delivering, and my communication about both, it's a triangle.
Kris Plachy:
And there is opportunity. I'm willing to bet in all three for that to improve. And then, and only then, do we have the ability to address their contribution, good, bad or indifferent. Where that accountability begins is after we've done the work of ensuring we've built a structure for them to succeed in. And that's where your trust comes from. Because if I know, I have, listen to me. This job is airtight. These responsibilities are airtight.
Kris Plachy:
These goals, crystal clear, though, how you win. Crystal clear. This thing is airtight. Then when Jim doesn't deliver, "I trust myself to resolve it. It's Jim. It's his work schedule, it's his ability to focus. I don't know, because I have been crystal clear. We made the agreements and we know what they are.
Kris Plachy:
So now I don't need to doubt myself. I need to trust that I will resolve it. I don't have to be mad at Jim. I can just tell Jim, 'Hey, dude, you didn't do what you and I agreed to. So here's what I'm going to do.'" And we don't give our power to Jim, and we don't go home and drink wine and complain to our spouses about Jim. We just resolve it. We end the drama.
Kris Plachy:
We move along. And the last thing I'm going to leave you with is a truth that I think a lot of people get mad at me for saying. But I'm going to say it. For as long as you run a company, for as long as you have people that work in your company, you will be hiring and you will be firing and you will do so more than you thought you ever had to. Especially now. People don't stay very long. If you have a belief that people should stay, what, for two years? Whatever the old adages were, whatever, stop.
Kris Plachy:
People don't stay. Their job is not to be loyal to you. Your job is to provide an environment where they can be successful, where they are treated well, where they are compensated fairly for their results. Whether you are holding them accountable, they make agreements in exchange for that to deliver results. How long they stay, that's not up to you. So getting wrapped around the axle when people quit, when people don't stay as long as you think they should, after you've invested all this time and money in them, I get it. You signed up for it when you said you wanted to have a business. And it's not going to change.
Kris Plachy:
You're going to keep hiring, you're going to keep firing, people are going to keep quitting. But if you trust yourself, if you build this thing so it's a repeatable thing, then just get about the business of a solution instead of wishing you didn't have to deal with this. Whatever you're dealing with today, it's just part of the deal. Comes with the territory, right? Okay.Hey, if you haven't gotten onto my Lead waitlist yet, you probably should go to thevisionary.CEO/nextstep and add your name to the waitlist. We will be announcing all sorts of interesting things over the next several weeks. The next Lead program is eight weeks long. It's live with me once a week on Wednesdays, and you will receive ten lessons from me in addition to the live work that we're going to do together.
Kris Plachy:
And you'll get to be working with all sorts of other female entrepreneurs. And so it's an incredible environment focused exclusively on dealing with the people part of your business, how to have those conversations, how to make those decisions, how to hire them, how to fire them, how to address things you never thought you'd have to address, how to think about the problems that you're facing that you never thought you'd have to face. That is the environment that we're in.But if you've listened to this podcast for a long time, or maybe not even that long, I think you know one thing that's very true about me, which is I don't fret on problems for very long. I'm a big solver. So my live calls are not venting session. My live calls are solution calls, you bring to me. This is what's going on.
Kris Plachy:
And you and I, we're gonna solve, right? Because that's ultimately what you want, right? Unless you just like drama. But I don't think people listen to this podcast are big drama, drama people. You just want solutions, and you need some help. And so if that's you, join Lead. We start October 9. It's the only time you can work with me live for the rest of this year. So I really hope you go to thevisionary.CEO/nextstep.
Kris Plachy:
Get yourself on the list, and let's do this thing. Okay? All right. Talk to you soon.
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