Know When to Hold ‘Em, When to Fold ‘Em

Leadership and process are so important to clinical research effectiveness that the stakes are as high as a big-time poker game. Kenny Rogers sang that the key is to “know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em”. Tricky in poker and tricky in business: when and how do you remove a person from the job they are in, because they are an obstacle to success?

The toughest task an executive faces is to take a talented, well-respected and/or hard-working manager, and reassign him or let her go. It’s so tough, that many executives don’t do it. The most common response to an under-performing or difficult employee is to cover your eyes, cross your fingers and toes, and hope the person leaves or transfers on their own accord. It can be a long wait. And meanwhile, your operation suffers.

Many Reasons, Few Alternatives

The need to remove someone from a key position can have many sources. Some people’s jobs are no longer important to the enterprise, or the job has changed in a way that does not fit the experience or skills of the person in place. Sometimes the position has to be weighed against other needs, and the company simply cannot afford this spot anymore, useful as it may have been.

Sometimes the person has been promoted beyond their abilities (as Laurence J. Peter most famously wrote about in 1969). Often in clinical research organizations, you find managers who are threatened by change, and they resist in a misguided attempt to protect their jobs, when in fact they are ensuring their demise. And this is not just about firing the old-timer by any means – there are plenty of young rising stars promoted beyond their experiential foundation, where a senior person is better suited.

The team approach to so many clinical research processes today raises its own problems. As pointed out in previous columns, often the same small group of best team leaders are asked to serve over and over again, concurrently, on multiple teams. Effectiveness leading team A does not necessarily translate to team B, or the person may burn out, or not recognize that what worked for his last team is the wrong way to lead the new one.

The British have a unique word for letting someone go (“redundancy”) which can actually be quite accurate rather than simply euphemistic. This is particularly true in merger situations – what do you do with two directors of monitoring, or two directors of biostatistics? The tougher task in merger situations is to not protect people in power for the sake of merger politics, but to make the honest evaluation of the entire management pool and decide: who is best for the new company and its new needs?

Holding on to the wrong manager is particularly painful for small companies who cannot afford under-performers, or don’t have a place to hide them. In a small biopharma or service company, everyone is in the spotlight. The company is truly a lean multifunctional enterprise where everyone needs to do her job well, and there is no safety net. Shying away from the tough decision to hire or transfer brings everyone down. As Harvey Mackay observes in his book, Swim with the Sharks without Being Eaten Alive, “It isn’t the people you fire who make your life miserable, it’s the people you don’t.” Since I am enamored with baseball metaphors lately, think of it as leaving the long-time star pitcher in the game an inning too long: it hurts everyone, including him, if you don’t walk out to the mound and take the ball away.

Removing someone from their position can be particularly challenging for organizational cultures that move slowly, or that pride themselves on the proverbial “family atmosphere”. People don’t get fired from their families (much as we wish they could!), and the company perceives the value of the family metaphor to be so beneficial that they will suffer through years of misplaced, under-performing aunts and nephews.

Standing in the Way of Good Research

The relevance of the under-performing manager to clinical research is evident in many ways:

–Times are changing, and processes are changing. Not everyone is up to the task of change management or skilled in the nature of the new process, which may require more personal flexibility, less emphasis on making people feel good, and undoubtedly more technology-based tasks.

–The increasing pace of global development may be too much for someone who is not adept at multicultural management.

–A shift in therapeutic area focus will bring challenges that demand a mind willing to accept and understand how things are different.

–For each maturing generation, with its unique skills and experience, it can be difficult to lead a younger generation which has a subtle but meaningfully different set of values (and vice versa).

–And then there are the superstars who are put in a place of leadership, without the life experience to handle crises, the interpersonal skills to manage teams, or the sensitivity to recognize political or interpersonal subtleties.

Change is Good

In my experience, the most common cause for a failure to fire is fear, and usually this fear is based solely on inexperience with the process, and thus it is a self-perpetuating stalemate. Executives don’t learn how to move someone out of a position, and so remain fearful of it. There is nothing more personal than having to confront this issue, face-to-face, with the employee on the receiving end, and nobody wants to put themselves in that position.

At the risk of sounding like some hated Human Resources guy in a cartoon, management change does not have to mean execution; it can mean a mutually beneficial change. Clinical research organizations have many diverse needs, and experience in research is a valued prize. So the company can often benefit by applying the deposed manager’s abilities elsewhere in a new role, even if she is no longer “in charge” of something.

Of course a humanistic employer has an obligation to do everything it can to ease the transition or exit. The key is the make the decision as soon as all the evidence is in. Talk to your peers, superiors, and the person’s direct reports, but do not be afraid to follow your instinct. This is what you are being paid to do: make judgments. Move swiftly and fairly, and know what you want the next steps to be – where the person can transfer to, or how they can be helped to leave as positively as possible.

An executive we all admired once said wryly to me, as he was being escorted out of the building, “change is good.” A pharma manager recently told of seeing someone in a store some months after she had had to fire him. The man walked up to her and thanked her, for helping him move on to a better situation, “the best thing that ever happened to me.” Of course it doesn’t always have a happy ending, but happy endings is not what being an executive is all about.

Judy Collins sang the words that Sandy Denny wrote: “Ah, but then you know, it’s time for them to go.” May you have the wisdom and courage to recognize it when the time has come.