if someone’s struggling, consider “re-hiring” them
When people start a new job, they’re usually eager to prove themselves. The highwater mark for their hustle and optimism may be in the first hours, days, and weeks of their new gig.
Ben has used this knowledge to pull an excellent Jedi mind trick on me more than once. True to form, he called his shot and explained to me what he was doing. I have since tried it with teams of my own, to good effect.
The mind trick is “re-hiring” someone on your team, and I like it in each of these seemingly unrelated situations:
Someone on your team is struggling consistently and you fear that you may have to let them go
Someone on your team is a strong performer who has plateaued
Someone on your team is an all star who needs a new challenge
The idea is that you have a conversation with your teammate and you tell them directly that it is a “re-hiring” conversation. You treat the conversation like an interview, but one that has significantly more context and (hopefully) candor than the typical interview between strangers. You frame up what is expected of them, what you anticipate will be challenging, and what you want them to embrace (not just tolerate) with visible, audible enthusiasm. You tell them not to take this “new job” unless they’re genuinely excited about all of this. You give them a chance to sleep on it.
It’s easy to live by averaging today against the days in recent memory. You lose initiative and fall prey to inertia. Cognitive biases like the anchoring effect and recency bias trick you out of the hustle and optimism that carried you on day one. Incremental gains and losses don’t inspire you because they don’t fit into a story of what this day is for and why it matters.
The re-hiring conversation can interrupt this inertia and set you up to attack the work ahead with new zest and creativity.
This is not a riskless move. If you’re telling them not to take the job unless they’re excited, you have to mean that. They might come back to you and tell you they’re not excited. Then you have to decide a) if you have to let them go altogether or b) you have a different offer available for them.
Whether you get an enthusiastic leap into the “new job” or a sadder step away from it, you’ve moved away from the ambiguity, apathy, and resentment that can plague you and your people when day 1 is far behind you.
-Eric
