Right-sizing is more than a nice-sounding term for laying off or reducing the size of an organization to improve efficiency and accommodate a shrinking market. Right-sizing as a leadership mentality can be a crucial tool to advance yourself as a leader and manager.
Have you ever had a client, employee, or situation that has occupied far too much of your mental space? You might obsess over little actions and behaviors, scrutinize every conversation, or replay the situation over and over in your head. All your other tactics for distracting yourself and moving on from fixating on this particular thing just isn’t working this time around.
Let me clarify here – I am an extreme overthinker in all aspects of my life and I have had to put a concerted effort towards developing strategies to declutter my mental space and compartmentalize my professional from my personal life. I know not everyone will be able to relate to that mentality, but even so, even the most pragmatic leader has found themselves hyper-focused on a particular situation.
When I first started my career, I had a very difficult employee. He was with the company for nearly six years. I was new to title, new to management, and new to owning my own company. He was a veteran of the industry, had decades of experience, and little patience for me learning on the fly. We settled into an uneasy cadence with him operating in his own little bubble, until he would bump up against the rest of my team, operating under my management. I still remember the curdling anxiety in my stomach when I could hear his footsteps coming to my office. I knew it was always a problem, it was always my fault either directly or in how I trained his coworkers, and I would never be able to provide a satisfactory response.
This inability to get on the same page with him literally kept me up at night, for years. I tried every single tactic I could think to appease this employee. I tied myself in knots trying to make him happy and make the rest of my team happy, even though they clearly were miserable working with him. In 2018 I started my EMBA program which was leadership focused, and once I was comfortable enough with my cohort and my professors, I would bring up this employee and ask for their advice. Every single time the advice was the same: he needed to be terminated. It was a bad fit, he was toxic to the workplace. My response was always the same: we can’t let him go, we need him. They would look at me a little sadly, shrug, and move on with the lesson.
What needed to be evaluated was why I thought this employee was immune to being terminated. Why I thought my company would suffer with his absence. When you grow a company from one employee to more than one, it can be very easy to think that because you’re relying on them to support you as you grow, that the company will backtrack if you replace them. I was terrified of putting my company in a worse position just because I had one difficult employee.
This is where right-sizing comes into play. It’s very easy to develop strong interdependent relationships with your employees, especially in a smaller organization. I would argue that those relationships, with appropriate boundaries, are actually crucial to the organization’s success. However, the myth that a single employee is absolutely critical to your organization’s success can cripple it instead and delay making decisions that need to be executed to advance to the next level.
Here’s the right-sizing in this situation: everyone is replaceable. Sure, you can nod along, agree with it as a principle, but pretty soon your brain is going to start throwing up exceptions. Don’t. There are no exceptions. Everyone is replaceable. The resistance is that you think not everyone is replaceable if the organization is to stay exactly the same.
There’s the key – why would you want your organization to stay exactly the same? Because it’s safe, predictable, or it “works right now.” If it ain’t broke… But it was broken – I had a toxic employee in my organization affecting it from every single level and I allowed the fear of the unknown – what would my organization look like without him – to prevent and prolong the inevitable decision: he was not the person for this company. I know a company where 90% of their revenue comes from one sales rep. Is she replaceable? Yep. You might need three replacements or a different revenue model but the bottom line is the same. The question is not “is she replaceable?” but rather “what does it look like to replace her?”
By practicing right-sizing, you can prepare as a leader for all sorts of changes. Because maybe you’d never fire that sales rep, but what happens if she decides to leave? Are you going to increase her compensation to the detriment of the rest of your staff, laying people off to afford this one person? Or would it be helpful to put your organization in a position that one singular employee does not have that type of stranglehold on your profitability?
Right-sizing is a skill that I highly recommend you practice developing. It not only gives an overthinker like me a break from putting all the blame and all the work on myself to correct an issue caused by someone else, but it also gives you the mentality of managing an organization, not individuals. What’s the best decision for the company? It’s hard, and it’s a muscle that has to be worked. But I know first-hand how beneficial it can be to be able to right-size a difficult situation and make the next best step for yourself and your organization.
