a leadership framework, person, problem, performance

Summary

an employee told me they couldn’t work because of an election result. real conversation, real person, real performance issue. that moment is where most leaders mess up. they argue about the problem itself.

the framework I use is three Ps.

1. person. respect them. their feelings are their feelings, not your job to change.

2. problem. acknowledge the problem exists for them. you don’t have to share it.

3. performance. draw a clean line from the problem to the impact on the company. that’s the only conversation worth having.

as CEO my responsibility is company performance. that has to come first or there’s no company for anyone to work at. small issues left unchecked become cultural problems, then they become reasons people leave. lead with respect for the person, but never lose the line to performance. that’s the job.

Transcript

introduction to the three p framework for leadership

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey. So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. All right. Today I am going to go over the three P framework for leadership.

And when you’re dealing with more nuanced problems in your company as an entrepreneur and as a leader. So this is the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon, and I’m going to go over a very specific issue because I found it very interesting. Why? I had someone reach out to me and they were talking about an employee. They wanted to know what to do because ultimately they had a good employee. But as you know, the election wrapped up, you know, last month and the employee was very unhappy with who won the election.

discussion of a real-world leadership challenge involving an employee affected by external events

And that’s fine. Whoever you want to win or lose or whatever, that’s your own right decision. But so unhappy that they said they would not be able to come into work at all this week because of that reason. That was the reason they gave their employer. Now, this is a nuanced leadership issue, right? Because ultimately a good employee. But something like that, the person they wanted to win the election didn’t. And so now they’re so mentally distraught, they can’t come into work.

What do you do? I mean, ultimately, if someone’s just not coming into work, yeah, you can fire them. You can. But that’s not always the decision, you know, you should make or the stance that you should take. And not the knee jerk reaction firing people was normally the last resort, right? So it comes down to communication. Nine times out of 10, leadership is going to be about communication. But here’s the deal. Here’s what you can’t do.

importance of communication in leadership and understanding personal perceptions

And this was the knee jerk reaction. The person I spoke to about this was they wanted to focus on the problem that the person was having. They wanted to focus on the fact that I don’t care who won the election. You need to show up for work. They wanted to try and change that person’s mind about their perception of this problem. That’s never going to work. I mean, you can try. You can try. You can try.

That’s never going to work. And so it’s not your job as a leader. To try and change someone’s perception about a problem. And this is the same with stress. Some people perceive stress very differently than others. Some people get incredibly stressed out over very little things, and some people have an amazing threshold for stress and they can take on a lot. And as an entrepreneur, you actually end up building that muscle over time. And so when something small comes along, it doesn’t affect you as much, but it might be stressful to your employees.

detailed explanation of the three p framework: person, problem, performance

And again, the response can’t be. Don’t stress out over that. It’s not stressful. You can’t tell someone else that because stress is perception. Especially these kind of problems. And so you can’t try and fix that. You can’t say, hey, look at things how I do. You can’t say be different. You can’t tell somebody their problem is not a problem. You can’t do any of those things as a leader. And the assumption is that you want to keep this employee around and respond immediately when they tell you something like this.

Because what’s what’s next? You know, like if we just get in, get into politics, is it going to be every decision that’s made is, you know, you’re so distraught. You are no longer able to work like, is this going to compound into a problem, you know, over the next four years with this employee? If you allow it this one time? And the answer is yes, people will walk all over you if you don’t take some sort of stance.

how to apply the framework to ensure team alignment and address performance issues

But like I said, we’re not going to focus on the problem, tell them their problems, not a problem, or they just need to suck it up and come into work. That’s not actually good leadership. So what you need to do is, like I said, the three P, you know, leadership method here is, first, you have the person, you have the problem, and then you have the performance. And so a person will have a problem. It’s irrelevant whether or not you agree with this being a problem or not being a problem.

I think we’ve beat that dead horse. What you need to do is draw a line to their performance. So that’s what you need to do. You need to make the connection as a leader from the person to their problem and how can we improve that problem to get better performance. It always goes back to the performance, always the performance in the company. Because while as a leader, you can be a bit of a life mentor, especially in small companies, it’s ultimately not your job, but you can be that person.

discussion on the implications of leadership decisions on company culture and team dynamics

But ultimately, your job as a CEO and owner of the company is the company’s performance. And so that is how you have to draw a line. That’s the line that you have to draw for your employees. So it’s not so much, hey, don’t perceive this problem as a problem. Don’t be that way. You have to say, hey, I get it. I get how that makes you feel. And you might not want to work because you’re not all mentally there today.

But from my desk, from my point of view, this is going to impact the company significantly. You’re not coming in. We’re not going to get X, Y, and Z done. Widgets won’t be made today if you’re not here. This is going to significantly impact the company. And you can talk about how, but ultimately, I’m always trying to draw the line from the person through the problem to the performance and how ultimately we need the performance to be there.

closing thoughts on the responsibilities of a leader and the impact of their decisions on the company’s performance

We need the performance to improve. And when you don’t, you start attacking the problem, the person is going to feel attacked. And that’s not what you want as a leader. You never want your employees to feel attacked, like they’re doing something wrong personally or their problems aren’t problems and you’re trying to dismiss them. It’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to communicate to our employees that ultimately we are on the hook for performance. They are on the hook for performance in a performance can’t be met.

Then you know, that’s going to be a bigger problem down the road. And so that is the connection you need to make person to problem to performance. Never just the person in the problem, because again, you’re going to start attacking people. They’re not going to feel like they’re part of a good team and you’re ultimately going to lose that person. And I think problems like this are going to come up more and more as time goes on, just with newer generations.

So I think knowing how to attack these, having this feather in your cap is going to be a lot better. And it doesn’t mean that this is going to solve the problem for you. It’s just the approach you want to take is communicate quickly, often and make it about performance and tie how your job is about the performance of the company, which is ultimately their job since you are employed by them and work for them. It doesn’t mean the person’s going to agree or see how you see things.

But at the end of the day, if someone’s not coming into work and it’s for something that’s not because I’m not talking about big issues here, I’m not talking about someone’s battling severe depression or illness or their kids are sick or, you know, someone died like I’m not talking about any of these big problems where as a leader, you can flex the empathy muscle and give people time off and, you know, you can make all those judgment calls on a case by case.

But I’m talking about smaller things that can compound into bigger issues over time. You have to handle those right away or your company culture and your staff can run away with you really fast. And so you have to set those standards and the standards should always be about the performance of the company, because if you can make that connection, then people will start to understand. That’s why we’re all here. And the decisions they make are going to affect the performance of the company.

If they make too many decisions that affect the performance of the company in a negative way, then they’re not a person who can be on the team. It has nothing to do with how they perceive problems, the decisions they make, their political preferences or ideologies has nothing to do with any of that. It has to do with whatever you’re facing. It’s affecting the performance of the company too much to keep you on the team. And that’s ultimately the stance I’m going to take.

And you might see things differently. You might just, hey, give that person a week off, give them two weeks off. And that’s fine if you want, because you think it’s one time, but I’ve seen this play out over and over and over again with people I consult with and work with, and they think or they thought it was going to be this one off thing. I mean, I have several instances of this where people are getting trampled on in the leadership standpoint because they think it’s just this one thing.

They think that this person will never take advantage of them. This is legitimate. I’m going to give them that time off, even though like maybe we really shouldn’t. And they think it’s just that one time and it never is. It turns into a small little seed of a problem. And then it grows, gets taller, takes on branches, gets thicker. Like it just starts to turn into bigger problems. And then other if you have one employee, fine, if you see this compound across multiple employees, you’re building a culture that you might not be able to keep up with.

And at some point you sit around your ass when you had one person, you gave that one person a week off or something like that, and you didn’t think is going to be a big deal. But now you have a team of 11 and nine of them are doing something like this. And, oh, crap, it’s all at the same time. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? You know, so you have to make the tough decisions as a leader.

I talk about that often in leadership and. It’s not always easy, it might be against what you really want to do, but you have to only be thinking about the performance of the company, that’s your job. That’s your job, so many people forget that as an entrepreneur, that your only job as the CEO of your company is the performance of the company. You can add as much empathy, company culture, good ideas, feel good stories, whatever you want, that’s fine, like have the company culture that you want to have.

But at the end of the day, you are on the hook for the performance of your company. And if the company is not performing because your employees are not performing, that’s on you and you just need to try harder.