Sabrina Baker  0:10  
The HRHappyHour Network is sponsored by Workhuman. Employees recognized for milestones are three times more likely to believe their company actually cares about them, three times. So why are companies so bad at it? The stale bagels, the branded swag, the audacity. Workuman believes milestones deserve their moment, a space for the people who know you best, your actual work circle, to reflect on your journey, your wins, your impact, the inside jokes, the big moments, all of it, it's called service milestones. AI finds the right people. Automation handles the rest and employees choose their own reward from millions of options curated just for them. Milestone like you mean it with Workhuman, a proud supporter of the HRHappyHour network. Find out more at workhuman.com. Thanks for joining us.

Sabrina Baker  1:23  
Before we get into today's episode, I want to take a minute to reintroduce myself, in case you are new here, and share who this show is for, because it is very specific. My name is Sabrina Baker. I am the CEO and founder of Acacia HR Solutions. We are an embedded fractional HR support firm. We've been in business for 15 years, and we work solely in the startup and small employer space. I say small employer because our clients have between one and 500 employees. All of the content we share here on the HRHappyHour network, on our own podcast, the HR Connection that produces weekly, on YouTube, on blogs, everything is geared towards those managing HR or leading any role in a one to 500 organization. There is a lot of great content in the HR space, but most of it is built around enterprise. HR, large teams, dedicated legal counsel. HR, business partners, Chief People Officers with real budget and actual authority. That's not what we're about here. That's not what we're doing. We are doing this in the small employer space. You might be a solo HR generalist. It might be. You might be an office manager who somehow ended up owning onboarding and benefits and whatever else they could have thrown at you compliance wise. You might be somebody who is not even an HR professional that is just stuck with HR trying to figure out what on earth you are supposed to be doing. Whatever the title this is the place for you, if you are doing HR, in an environment where the rules are different, where you don't have a team to delegate to, where the CEO is also the person you're probably trying to manage up to, where a single bad hire or a single unaddressed performance issue can ripple through the entire organization in ways that just doesn't happen at scale. Small Business HR is not a simplified version of enterprise HR. It is its own discipline, and it requires a different set of skills, a different approach to influence and a very different tolerance for ambiguity. That's what this show is built around. Every episode. If that's where you are, you're in the right place. Please hit that subscribe button, and let's get into it.

Sabrina Baker  4:04  
What do you do when the worst performing employee is the founder's favorite and not just a little bit protected? I mean, everyone knows they are untouchable. They miss deadlines, the rules that apply to everyone else do not seem to apply to them. Maybe they even create issues with the team from their own leadership position, and nothing happens. Not just someone who slips through the cracks, not someone who needs a little coaching, I mean, the person everyone knows is toxic and absolutely nothing happens. If you're managing HR in a small business and you've ever been told, leave them alone, they've been here forever, this episode is for you. Because this is one of the most frustrating realities in small business HR, and while the phenomenon of a sacred cow is not unique to small business HR, I know enterprise has that as well, the impact of having someone who everyone sees as toxic yet the CEO sees as a savior can be devastating in small environments. So what happens when leadership won't hold someone accountable and HR is expected to clean it up? That's what we're really going to be talking about today. You are trying to enforce consistency, but leadership keeps making exceptions, and that's not just frustrating, it's destabilizing. So let's talk about those sacred cows, why they exist, what they're actually costing the business, because it could be a lot, and what you can realistically do when you don't have the authority to actually manage them. 

Sabrina Baker  6:12  
If I had a nickel for every time I have walked into a leadership development situation or an employee engagement project, survey project, and I have been told that if I get any feedback about so and so, that I should just keep it to myself, because it will fall on deaf ears. If I had a nickel for every time that happened, I could have retired already. So many small businesses have one. It's almost more surprising when they don't. Some have more than one. It's usually someone who's been there since the early days. Maybe day one. Maybe they helped build the entire company. Maybe they drove early revenue. Maybe they have a personal or even familial relationship with the founder. I once had a founder call me in and tell me that she knew when I ran her engagement survey that I was going to get feedback about Carrie, and she wanted to let me know that whatever feedback she got, she would never do anything about it. Why? Because Carrie was her sister, and, you know, maybe at one point, these sacred cows were the right people for the job. But the business has changed. The expectations have changed. Things have changed, and they have not, and now you as HR are left managing the gap between who they were and what the business needs today. And here's the really critical part, which I don't really have to tell you if you're living it, because you see this daily. This is not hidden. It's very, very visible inconsistency. The team knows who the rules apply to and who they don't. Most HR professionals and most employees frame this as a fairness issue, saying, you know, this isn't fair. It's not really fair. 

Sabrina Baker  8:05  
That's really not the problem. The problem is what it does to the rest of the organization. The fastest way to lose your best employees, or let's face it, even your mediocre ones, is to protect your worst. It's to keep protecting the ones who aren't doing really anything, or who are toxic, because when they see someone consistently underperform, or worse, actually create a toxic environment with zero consequence, they make a decision, and that decision is either stay and completely disengage from the work or leave. If one person can ignore standards, you don't have standards. You have exceptions. And exceptions scale faster in a small business than any policy you write. They quickly become the norm, and then you get stuck in the middle trying to enforce a system that leadership has shown through its actions it doesn't really support. There are two mistakes that I see happen when HR tries to fix this. Most people try to solve this at the employee level. So they try to coach, give feedback, deal directly with that employee, more documentation, more conversations. And that's not where the problem is. This is not a performance issue. I mean, it is, but it's more a protection problem, that employee is being protected intentionally or unintentionally, by somebody with power. And until that changes, the outcome will not change. The second mistake is how HR escalates the issue, bringing isolated examples, framing it emotionally, hoping that the leader, the founder, the CEO. Will connect the dots. They won't, not because they don't understand, but because they've already made a decision about this person, whether they have said it out loud or not. That decision has been made, and if you're not framing the issue at the level that the decision was made, you're not going to influence it. 

Sabrina Baker  10:23  
Two episodes ago on the HRHappyHour network, we talked about influencing from the middle, and this is a perfect place to practice that. Building influence happens not in the moments where you actually have it. It happens in situations like this, where you don't, not in these perfect, ideal conditions, but here in these really sticky ones. And there are three moves that I think can help. Let me explain them, and then I'll share how I have navigated this with clients over the last 15 years. The first thing I do is prime the feedback I have learned over the years to set leaders up to take feedback they don't want to take. If I know that I'm going to have to share something they aren't going to want to hear, or something they're definitely not going to want to take action on, I have a prep meeting with them first, and this meeting could actually be weeks before I deliver the actual feedback. The meeting usually prefaces some training I'm doing. Usually, like I said, leadership development. Sometimes it could be that we're going to launch an engagement survey project, something that the leader has agreed to me doing, they're very excited about us doing, and we know that we're going to get feedback that is going to be tough for them to hear during that time. So in this prep meeting, I asked them to describe the culture or employee experience, which is what I call culture that they think they have or are trying to build for employees. They always say they have a great culture, and they use words like transparent, lots of open communication. We're very engaging, we're very fair. All of these words, right? And so then I ask them that, if I were to find out anything in my work that contradicts that, would they want to know about it? And of course, they say yes. Can't say no. And then I ask if I find out there is an employee or a leader who is not embodying that employee experience, do you want to know that? Also usually, yes, of course, immediately. Why? How can they say no, they sometimes can hesitate on this one, especially if they know that they're going to get feedback about somebody they're protecting. They will sometimes hesitate, and sometimes they will even tell me, right then, they will be very honest with me right then and there, and say, you are absolutely going to get feedback about somebody, and that allows us to have that conversation about why they're protecting this person, or what are they going to do about it. But most of the time, they just say, yes please. If you hear about a leader who's not embodying this, I want to hear about it. And then my final question that sets all of this up is that I explain that any of these projects like leadership development or engagement surveys, they are only as good as what we do with them. 

Sabrina Baker  13:39  
We get to do a lot of focus groups, those are only as good as what you do with them. So whatever feedback we get, positive or negative, we need to be willing to act upon it. If we don't, we are wasting everyone's time, and if we ignore especially the negative feedback, then that immediately lessens how effective any of these programs will be in the future. Employees aren't going to keep giving feedback that's not heard, so when I tell them that, they immediately say they understand and they are willing to hear the feedback and take action. Now sidebar here, I don't necessarily believe them in that moment, but I know that I have set myself up to have a better conversation with them when I do have the feedback, because they at least won't be completely surprised. I can call back on this conversation. Sometimes I think that we can dump feedback on a leader about something they really value, or someone they really value, and it catches them off guard, and then, because of the relationship and the fact that they're surprised, now, they get defensive for that person, and they kind of shut down, and they're not really hearing what you have to say. So priming the feedback is the way to help them be ready when you give them feedback you know is coming, anyway it's coming. So you need to be able to preempt that convo with that leader, so that it does make it seem like the feedback could really be about anything. We're doing an engagement survey. It's not necessarily that you're going after that person. It's an open engagement survey, and this is what you have found. Now I know that some of you might be thinking, hey, Sabrina, that sounds great, but I don't have a leadership development initiative on the calendar. We're not doing an engagement survey. We don't have any of those things coming up where I would get some universal feedback. I don't have a natural event to feed this or to anchor this to. I totally get that. And the reality is that you don't necessarily need one. It's great to have those. It's easier, it's a it's a natural setup if you have one, but you can still do this. So let's talk about some ways that you might be able to prime this feedback. 

Sabrina Baker  15:59  
The setup conversation doesn't necessarily have to be tied to a formal project. It just has to happen before you deliver hard feedback, not at the same time. The sequencing is what matters, not the event. The simplest version of this is a reoccurring one on one or a leadership check in that you're already probably doing on a regular basis. You use one of those conversations well before anything specific comes up to ask the same category of questions. So you could frame it around a general reflection, saying something like, I want to make sure I'm bringing you the right things this year. Can I ask, when you think about the culture, the employee experience you're trying to build here, what matters most to you? And then you just let them talk, and then you say and if something ever came up that was working against that from any level, would you want me to flag it? They're going to say, yes, of course. And so you make a mental note, and then you move on. You don't give them any feedback in that moment. That's the setup. It takes you four or five minutes, and three months from now when you need to tell them that their CFO is running people off. You are not walking into a cold room. You are walking into a conversation you already set up. They already said they wanted to have this conversation. Another version is if you, you know, genuinely don't have a one on one cadence with leadership, or you don't have regular meetings, which that's kind of a problem worth solving on its own, but we'll do that in a different episode. Is to request a brief check in positioned around your role. I want to make sure I'm prioritizing the right things for you this quarter. Would you have 20 minutes, use that meeting to understand their goals, somewhere in that conversation, ask the question, if I ever surfaced something that was creating risk or friction towards these goals and for the business, even if it was uncomfortable, is that something you'd want to hear? Nobody ever says no to that, but now you have an answer, and more importantly, they've heard themselves say yes. The principle is the same. Regardless of the vehicle. You are separating the setup from the delivery you are getting a yes before you have the specific thing, and when the specific thing comes, it lands differently because they already agreed to hear it. The second move you want to make here is to pattern the behavior. You want to stop bringing stories and start bringing repetition. So not saying this happened last week and telling them a story, but this has happened five times in the last two weeks, or three different employees have raised the same concern. 

Sabrina Baker  19:22  
Patterns create weight, they carry weight. They are much harder to dismiss than one single story that you have, and especially if those patterns involved high performers or other deeply valued employees. So let me give you a story from my own work, I once had to give a founder feedback on his CFO. This was a very sacred cow of his. The CFO had been with him from the beginning. They had made, admittedly many personal sacrifices. Everyone knew that this CFO had given up a lot to help make this business what it was that day. You know, where grown it to where it was in that moment. But he was an awful leader, and the founder had protected him for years. I had prepped the founder for feedback conversations when we first started with them, but one day, when I brought one to him, he stopped me before I could even get into the meat of it, and said, I need to know who on his team gave you this feedback. And the reason he was asking is that there were four team members on the team, two of them were lower performers, and we were even coaching them, potentially putting one on a pip. And so we were maybe looking at moving those people out of the business, but two of them were not. And one of his Higher Performers is somebody that we had wined and dined for months to try to get and she had finally decided to come to that organization, and he was very excited to have her there. And when I told him that the feedback was from all four of them, all four of those people had given the same feedback because half of that was his very high performer, someone who he absolutely did not want to leave, he was so much more interested in hearing. Now, I know that feedback that's viable should be heard no matter who it's from. We all know that. But in practice, sometimes we're dealing with humans who have emotions and they will absolutely discredit something that you know they think the person maybe doesn't have a right to say. And so when you have feedback from somebody else that they value, another trusted employee, another highly respected employee, there's so much more interested in hearing and acting on the things that you're trying to get them to act on. 

Sabrina Baker  21:49  
So you want to translate these business these patterns into a business impact as much as you can, you know, saying we're going to lose the person we spent months finding because your CFO doesn't know how to talk to people, that is so impactful and much more likely to get them to do something about it. And then the third move is to package the decision so you do not want to escalate problems. You want to bring decisions to them. They have no idea how to handle this, especially if that person is a close friend or family member, they likely know they need to do something. But if you just give them the feedback and then expect them to figure it out, I'm telling you, they won't. They will likely just keep letting it perpetuate, because that's easier. Dealing with it is really, really hard and uncomfortable, and they would just kind of let it go. I typically see these things going one of three ways, and these are the decisions that I help CEOs make. The first one is retain with defined expectations and a very clear timeline for improvement. Option two is to redesign the role to limit impact, and then option three is an exit with a structured transition plan. Each option includes consequence, and none are fun to navigate. I'll tell you that. And which one you choose really depends on a lot of other factors, Chief of which is the offender's willingness to change. If that isn't present, option three is usually your only option. 

Sabrina Baker  23:32  
Option two is only used when they can limit themselves to maybe being an impact to the CEO, founder, so maybe in an advisor role. And so most of the time I see option one and option three is the chosen path, but option one only if they're willing to take the development. Now I hate to be captain obvious here, because I know that we say this about everything in small business HR, but I often know, I also know that it's very true. And sometimes this does take time. Sometimes you do all of that, all of the things that I've said, all of the steps and nothing changes. The founder just keeps them. Sometimes they seemed very willing to hear you and make a change on Monday, and then they went home and slept on it and came back in Tuesday, and are now hedging. When this happens, you want to do what you can to keep the conversation going without pressuring them to do something right now. They're just not willing to do something right now. If they are hedging and you try to force a decision, they're not going to make the one you want. So here's what I say, when a CEO is refusing to take action or hedging, I say, this is your decision. I'm going to keep bringing you feedback as I get it, but ultimately, you own the risk of this person continuing to affect the workplace in the way that they are. If you are comfortable with that risk, then I will try to navigate it as best I can, and then we keep having the conversation every time it makes sense to do so. In 15 years of running this business, working solely with one to 500 I can tell you something that might give you a glimmer of hope, and that is that eventually something happens that the leader cannot ignore. Ignore. 

Sabrina Baker  23:59  
Something happens, hopefully you can get them to address it before it gets too egregious. But sometimes it does take something major to finally get a leader to do something about a sacred cow. I wish that wasn't true, but I know that it is. The hardest part of dealing with employees in a small business is dealing with the ones you're not allowed to manage. And this is where a lot of HR professionals get stuck, and they get burned out and they get overwhelmed, because they define success as fixing the person, and that's not always the job. Success is leadership, making a conscious decision, not avoiding one. Success is reducing the impact of that decision on the rest of the business, because you cannot build a consistent organization on inconsistent decisions, even when those decisions come from the top or the best place, you just can't do it. Thanks so much for being here. Please subscribe. See you next time you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai