Know When to Walk Away

Ever hold on too long? I do!

• I stayed in my first marriage too long
• I’ve held on to jobs too long
• And I’ve kept under-performing employees too long

Why? I’m not a quitter. I’m the kind of person that digs in and gets it done. If it gets tough – no problem, I’ll just work harder. I mean, isn’t that the American Way? Doesn’t hard work equal success?

Not necessarily. Just like in the line from “The Gambler,” sometimes the smarter choice is to walk away.

Seth Godin wrote a book about walking away called “The Dip.” In it he says, “Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.” So when should we – as leaders – be quitters?

If you have a problem employee and you’ve followed the 4-T model (that I wrote about in “Know When to Hold Them”) – and you’re still not seeing progress…it’s time to walk away.

?You see the issue with continuing to hold on is time.

Problem employees are time robbers.

Every minute you spend working with or thinking about a problem employee is a minute that could have been spent on something else that had a higher ROI.

Let me ask you a couple of questions:

1. What’s on your to-do list that never seems to get done?
2. What great idea do you have that you don’t have the time to implement?
3. How much time do you spend on “employee issues” every week?

Now ask yourself this question:

What could I have accomplished this week if I hadn’t spent (insert the amount of time) dealing with (insert the problem employee’s name)?

Smart leaders know they can’t afford to waste their resources on a losing proposition. So they make the difficult decision to cut their losses and walk away.