Alan Crone

sit down and talk to him about it and find out what was going on and maybe how they could change it. The guy just fired him. The supervisor thought that he was enforcing a standard. But what ended up happening is they lost an employee with 30 years of institutional knowledge and a lawsuit and a big settlement.

Again, going back to expectations, let's say that you're going to hire an accountant or let's say you're going to hire a banker. You say, okay, I need a commercial banker. You find someone who's been in the commercial banking industry for 20 years. They got great reviews and you put them in just because they've been a successful commercial banker somewhere else.

Doesn't necessarily mean they're going to fit into your culture. Doesn't mean they're going to have your values. Doesn't mean that they have your priorities. And doesn't mean that they're going to do the job exactly the way you want it to be done. The hiring person has a vision of what it is to be a commercial banker.

The commercial banker has 20-year maybe experience of what he has been as a commercial banker. And for whatever reason, those don't align. Maybe the decision maker just says, you've been a commercial banker for 20 years. Don't you know? As opposed to, here's what we really need.

What a great question. What a great question. Employment law compliance is not just good legally, it's good business for precisely the reason that you're talking about. And I think, again, it requires some thought and attention. Well, first of all, the employment laws are not written to make you a better business. to make you more profitable or anything else.

The employment laws are written to give minimal amount of protection. And when I say minimal, I mean minimal amount of protection to certain workers in certain circumstances. But there's a way to take those requirements and supercharge them for business.

One of the things overall that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 brings is this idea that you have to treat everyone the same, that you can't have discrimination, that you can't have harassment. You know, not harassing your employees is good business.

Again, if you take that and you take it to heart and you say, okay, how can we take this legal requirement and supercharge it into making our business better? And so one way you can do that is to, you know, take that, those trainings that, that right now are kind of pro forma, you know, watching a video of some guy come over and say something inappropriate to some woman and,

Okay, what should they do now? That sort of thing. To go on beyond and talk about awareness of body language and sexual cues and all of these things. What is appropriate and what isn't appropriate in the workforce and turn that into a communication opportunity.

Progressive discipline, essentially this notion of getting written up and then you have a warning and then, you know, that you get an opportunity to change or correct your behavior before, you know, something bad happens to you. what the law calls an adverse employment action, right? You should have that be not progressive discipline, but progressive training.

So, you know, the law doesn't say that you have to have progressive discipline, you know, that you have to have three strikes and you're out, that sort of, that's just something that's kind of evolved.

If it's clear on the face of your communication, your lexicon, what you do from the moment that you begin to discipline or coach or train or whatever you want to call it, that the real goal is not to set you up to be fired, but is to give you every opportunity to succeed.

At the end, you can either show demonstratively that either you just didn't have the capacity to do what was right, or you didn't have the

willingness, then that becomes a pretty clear signal to everybody, the employee, management, and a judge or jury later on, if it becomes to that, that the company did everything it could to salvage the relationship, make the person successful, and they just weren't able to do it. I tell people, look, I can tell you how to never get sued for an employment violation. Very easy, never fire anyone.

It starts with Designing the position, understanding that unicorn that you need in that position, recruiting to that, and then train, train, train. It takes some time. It takes weeks and weeks and weeks of training, of mentoring to get that person up to where you want them to be, but it's worth it.

I think the first thing is if I'm a mid-level manager and I've got six to 10 people in my organization and I don't know how to manage them, I'd get into a growth mindset and take some classes, get some training, even if I have to pay for it myself. I see managers that have absolutely no idea how to lead someone and coach someone to success other than just saying, here's the KPI.

If you don't meet it, you're gone. I think that's a deficit. in their training and their understanding of what their other options are. All right, well, that's a certain way of management. That's probably not going to get you, that's not sustainable. That's one thing that can be done is really try to get some training and understanding how to do that. The other is, and I'm a broken record on this,

mission. You get somebody to buy into what it means and what that means not just to the business, but you just created 10 jobs, which is 10 families, maybe three kids that weren't going to go to college now are going to college. That is the kind of motivation that gets people up in the morning. Those are the people that you want working for you.

It's not just me making a quota, but it's me making somebody's life better. They've got a higher motive than just working for the company. So Those are just two ways, I think, that we can solve that problem. It's going to take a mind shift. It may take a little bit of stepping back and saying, look, one issue that I deal with in my law firm all the time, and I think people

across the board, there's not many metrics for it, and that is capacity. Because at some point, if you've got a team and that team is trying to do the work of three teams, again, that's not sustainable. But most people have no idea what their capacity really, really is. And you find out someone's capacity when they come to you and say, I don't care what the money is, I can't do this anymore.