Sound strange? (After all, "managing" people is what managers do -especially when the employee in question obviously needs some managing.) Here’s another way to introduce the idea: I’m often asked the following question by readers of my book Built to Last, who’ve bought into the importance of running a company according to clear, authentic core values. They say, "OK, I’ve got my set of core values. Now how do I get employees to share them?" What’s interesting about the question is that it’s the wrong one to ask. You don’t get people to share your core values. You can only get people who already do.

Think of how we all usually manage -how you manage your company, how I manage my research teams. We hire some people, we begin working with them, and then at some point we notice that there’s someone we just start to treat differently. To the rest of the team members you give guidance and instruction and all kinds of time, but you fundamentally don’t worry about the end output. You know that they will take the extra step to get things done right; you have confidence in them. In contrast, for this other person you start to build little processes designed to do one thing: to compensate for his or her inadequacies.

More important, you start compensating for a particular kind of inadequacy: the kind you can’t correct.

For example, over the years I’ve discovered what it takes for someone to perform well on one of my research teams. You have to have genuine curiosity and a real work ethic, and be naturally attentive to detail. (The research facts and numerical analyses that go into a book have to be right.) Typically, I’d have a team of four or five people and we’d be humming along, working well, until I’d start to notice that one of the researchers would begin coming to meetings unprepared, or asking for deadline extensions, or delivering work of lower quality. Now, one of the core values of my teams is that I don’t want to have to ask people to work hard; I want to be in the position of having to tell them to slow down, if anything. I expect a strong work ethic. And the thing about a work ethic is that I can’t teach it. As with a lot of other personal traits, if a person doesn’t have a work ethic as a core value, I can’t give it to him or her. Similarly, if an employee doesn’t have a dedication to service and doesn’t really enjoy serving people for its own sake, no one can get that person to provide extraordinary service. Even retailer Nordstrom, with all its beautiful mechanisms promoting service, ultimately can’t compensate for an employee to whom giving great service isn’t instinctively important. Nordstrom needs employees who already have the service gene -just as other businesses need people who possess the basic traits that match the business’s essential aims and personality. The traits may be behavioral characteristics, or ethical values, or something else. The key is knowing the difference between what is reasonably learnable and what is not.

What happened when someone on one of my research teams didn’t share my work ethic is that I had to start treating him differently -crosschecking his work more or preparing in advance for his shortfalls. I’d have to start managing rather than providing guidance and inspiration; I’d have to start compensating for the absence of a trait that is unlearnable. The instant that realization clicked, I knew I’d put the wrong person on the team. And when there are mismatches involving personality characteristics of the intrinsic, unlearnable kind -the kind involving basic personal values -the only smart thing a manager can do, ultimately, is to unplug the employee from the organization. Sometimes, in fact, the organization does the unplugging by itself.

Another thing HP couldn’t teach me to have is what it calls a passion for technical contributions. My managers there could teach me how to do good technical work, but they couldn’t teach me to feel passionate about the magnificent technological improvements we might be able to invent for, say, some little printer head. A passion for technical contribution is not a teachable, learnable character trait. Either you have that inside you or you don’t, and I didn’t. Nobody’s going to teach me to be passionate about technical contributions. Nobody’s going to teach me to be a good team player. It’s not in me. When I saw how HP had to manage me, I knew it was time to leave.

The line between this negative sort of managing and more positive kinds is subtle, but it’s not hard to draw. On one side are teaching, guiding, setting goals, and helping people discover and develop their talents. On the other side are what I would describe as repetitive correcting and actions you begin to take that you find are different from how you need to treat others. Another test: when you’re doing compensatory managing, you’ll find yourself expending an extraordinary amount of negative energy. The right kinds of employees, on the other hand, are energizing to work with because even when they make mistakes, they’re mistakes of the right kind, not the kind produced by a mismatch between your company’s core values and the employee’s basic character.

In such cases, we sometimes tell ourselves that attempting to "manage" a bad hire into consonance with the unlearnable behaviors he or she lacks is the only fair-minded, tactically expedient, or even morally obligatory, thing to do. But in the end, such attempts are destructive for all concerned -the company, the manager, and the employee as well.

That’s the message I hear from all my former business-school students who have started or run companies and with whom I keep in touch. I always ask them the same question as I connect back up with them: What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made? And they all say, "You know, my biggest mistake is that when I knew I had somebody who wasn’t right and that it was really time for a change, I waited too long before letting him go."

President Harry Truman weighed in on exactly this subject when reflecting on his famous confrontation with the hallowed General Douglas MacArthur. By the time of the Korean War, Mar-Arthur had come to drink of himself as a kind of king; he fundamentally didn’t accept the idea of civilian control over the military, and he was operating on his own agenda. And of course, what Truman did in the face of that was to try to rein his general in. He tried to manage MacArthur. And at some point it became clear that the things he was trying to manage were fundamental character issues at that stage of MacArthur’s life; they simply weren’t fixable. Finally, Truman concluded that whatever the political cost, he had to fire MacArthur, which he did.

And later in life Truman offered a last word on the episode, which can serve as our last word, too. "The only thing I learned out of the whole MacArthur deal," he said, "is that when you feel there’s something you have to do and you know in your gut you have to do it, the sooner you get it over with, the better off everybody is."

Davis Personnel, Inc.

3030 Windwood Trail

Fort Wayne, IN 46845

charlie@davispersonnel.com

www.DavisPersonnel.com

(260) 637-6756