When Your Best Worker Is the People Issue

As we celebrate Thanksgiving, it’s a great opportunity to be grateful for all the blessings in your life and business. Are you grateful for the people on your team? People issues make up the Number One frustration across business owners, as cited in an EOS Worldwide survey.

A major portion of bosses’ time and energy is spent on resolving people issues because someone isn’t the Right Person in the Right Seat (RPRS). But sometimes, the RPRS is the one who becomes an issue. Surprisingly, your best employees can create headaches for you and your team.

How can that be? These are the people you can always count on, whom you trust implicitly to do the right thing, and to do it with excellence. They fit your Core Values, they GWC their role and they even elevate the work of those around them. It’s simply a given that you can count on them—and that’s where the problem starts: it’s a given.

When Your RPRS Is the Problem

It’s human nature to give your attention to the problem areas, and that doesn’t include your best people. It’s easy to stop giving them your time and attention without even realizing it.

Think about how that impacts them—they’re the ones working harder to compensate for others who underperform. When you as the leader spend your time dealing with Wrong Person or Wrong Seat people issues, the RPRS can feel taken for granted. (And let’s be honest—often they’re right.) They don’t give their best to earn rewards or recognition, but everyone needs to be acknowledged for great work. Failing to do that eventually looks like you’re taking your best people for granted.

Invest in Your Best People

Are you spending more time with your RPRS or the Wrong People in the Wrong Seats? What message are you sending to your best people?

The upside of spending time with your best employees is that these are the people who are actively engaged on any given day. They are full of energy, they challenge your thinking and they make you a better boss. These employees have the capability to rise up and fill a void at any moment and to take the ball and run with it. Give them your time!

Don’t neglect your 5-5-5/Quarterly Conversations™ with the RPRS, because it’s a great opportunity to acknowledge their great work. Also take the time to pick their brains, which is a tremendous way of expressing their value to you. Ask them what’s working and what isn’t If they were in charge, what would they do? Find out where they see the bottlenecks in the process and any resolutions they would like to try.

If the RPRS has become complacent, that’s a sign that you’re not spending enough time with them. To smoke this out, ask them how they think they’ve been doing and let them answer the open-ended question. The RPRS will admit when they have become complacent, because they’re so far ahead of the other people on the team.

Challenge and Acknowledge

Don’t be afraid to challenge your best people to think outside the box. Challenge them to run with new ideas and opportunities so that they don’t become complacent. Make sure you’ve also got the right touch points with them and that they feel they’ve got enough of your time and attention to be energized and run with it.

Most of all, thank them for their contribution. Make sure they don’t feel like they’re being taken for granted. They need to hear that they’re appreciated. They might not need compliments every single day, but they must hear them!

This Thanksgiving time, it’s the perfect opportunity to take a Clarity Break™, and to think about which RPRS that you may have been neglecting. Go out of your way to thank them, reward them and recognize them for their contributions. If you’re not great at thinking of ways to reward and recognize, check out the book 1501 Ways to Reward Employees.