Leaders Letter 166 - The No Passengers Principle
It Is Time To Remove The Passengers From Your Business
Dear leaders, if I said no passengers within your team what would I be referring to?
A passenger (to me) is someone who always sits back, does just about enough and doesn’t strive to push their work forward or importantly improve the company’s status quo.
Passengers are in every business, in almost every team and are often hidden away by a lack of people management (managers this is on you, if you catch the early onset of passengers you can address it, if stays after six months it’s hard to reset) performers or by performances from their colleagues.
Having Potential & Good Is Different To A Passenger
I believe you can have brilliant performers who can take their foot off the gas from time to time and can have a lot on to keep up their high standards, however, allowing long-term mediocrity is going to have a hugely negative impact.
Middle managers have a hard job and motivating passengers can be almost impossible. It’s critical in management and leadership you know who’s adding value and whos detracting from it. This is where you can proactively score performance and output and then address them regularly.
Blending quant and qual with real work examples is critical to influencing, improving performance or replacing passengers.
Passenger True Impact
Passengers are often hindering your department's performance, they are coasting, and passengers often rub off in the wrong way and then bring on others for their ride and it can then spill over into other members of the team. Remember team members mimic behaviours especially hard and high performers who feel they are being taken advantage of.
Why A No-Passenger Principle?
Principles are what people can get behind, and agree on and they can lead behaviours.
Long-time readers will know I am a huge supporter of principles, I have:
Recommended leadership principles for each leadership team to agree on principles they are held accountable to,
Suggested you create departmental principles for each department to hold themselves accountable to each other and their colleagues
Guided with the popular strategy vision and mission cheatsheet to include behaviours (principled behaviours) each member of the company connects with and follows to improve performance.
Principles Over Pointers
When you look to create your principles or look at revisiting your principles (it's annual planning for most larger companies in August), you should question what you really need and what makes the business better and why no passengers are critical to reset expectations and drive the business forward at every given opportunity.
Principles are written up, formalised, put up in the office and shared so frequently the whole company should be able to repeat on request without any effort or hesitation. Being a pointer isn’t enough and this is when HR will likely have to be called in to help when principles are there to support managers and colleagues.
Do you agree?
This week’s focus action is to consider adding a no-passenger principle to your business and being clear on what behaviours work within your business and which behaviours will not be accepted.
Have a great week ahead,
Thanks,
Danny Denhard