Putting On My Big Girl Pants

I am one lucky gal, for many reasons.  One thing I am particularly grateful for this month is my Mastermind group – a group of fantastic women committed to growing and scaling our businesses.  During our most recent meeting we got to talking about difficult clients, and the occasional need to “demarket” a client.  Let’s get real people, demarket is just fancy talk for firing a client.  Sometimes it needs to be done.  A few of us talked about avoiding the discussion for a while, but also acknowledged how much more effective we were and how much better we could serve our remaining clients when we weren’t distracted by the single client that ate up much of our time in unproductive ways.  Every one of us confirmed that we made the right decision in firing certain clients that didn’t fit our business model.
 
As soon as we put on our “big girl pants” and had the tough conversations, we were more effective in serving our existing clients.
​

I

​The same thing happens in businesses, government and nonprofit arenas.    A small subset of employees will push boundaries too far, repeatedly behave badly, and in general make our professional life a nightmare.  These folks keep you awake at night.  We complain about it, but we often delay addressing the behavior. 
 
Problem:  When you accept bad behavior it becomes the new “normal” in your culture over time.
 
As a manager, it is your job to help both individuals and your business be successful.  This requires:

• Setting clear expectations
• Giving people the tools and training to be succeed
• Addressing performance deficiencies
• Providing course corrections when appropriate
• Terminating employees who cannot or will not meet these expectations

Failure to do these things results in decreased morale for your strong performers, incentivizes ongoing bad behavior and results in many sleepless nights for you. 
 
For your good employees and your business to thrive, you need to put on your big girl / big boy pants. 
 
Roo can help.