Don’t be the frog in the pot
Why not give yourself permission to improve the quality of your staff? You’ll have the benefit of working with people with better judgment and better skills: people who can really help you to accomplish what you want to accomplish — and not merely collect a paycheck.
No surprise: Better people are better for you
It’s faster, easier and cheaper to have better people working for you. If you hire — and keep — mediocre people, you and your managers will be working around them, dealing with their shortcomings or overcoming their mistakes. They won’t accomplish what you need, and you’ll be compromising your company’s results.
You become so accustomed to working that way that you don’t even notice — like the old story of the frog placed into a pot of water. If the water is boiling, the frog will immediately jump out. But if the water is lukewarm, and the burner is turned on low, the water heats so gradually that the frog relaxes and stays put, never noticing until he’s fully boiled.
Having better people
Having better people will give you better results.
And getting the help you need
will let you spend more time on what really matters.
I’ve seen far too many CEOs who have let themselves be lulled into accepting their existing staff just because they’ve gotten used to their shortcomings — just like the frog in the lukewarm pot of water.
Improve your staff, improve your results
The primary benefit of having a better staff isn’t in saving money, but it has the same effect: getting things done more quickly and more easily by fewer people. It not only improves results, it lowers costs as well.
Smarter, more capable people can add more value every step ofthe way, so they can be given broader responsibilities and held accountable for making much more important decisions.
If one person can complete tasks from beginning to end, there’s no time wasted passing things from one person to another, and no time-consuming checking of other people’s work. This makes for fewer handoffs, less time waiting for someone else to begin working on a project again, and much less chance of miscommunication or missing information.
When everyone can do what’s required, so can you!
When your staff members are doing everything you need them to do, you’ll find an unexpectedly large bonus. You’ll be freed from working around them. And that means you’ll be free to be the CEO your company needs you to be.
