What do you do when your superstar sales representative is a nightmare to work with….you can’t afford to lose that individual, right? Wrong! A superstar isn’t all that if they are bringing negative issues back into the team. I’ve had this situation several times with different results. Once the superstar actually gave notice and after being asked to allow the proper chain of command regarding communication of this change proceeded to tell everyone. What’s more, she also bashed the company, team, management and bragged about her new position. I decided to reduce her two week notice to leaving that same day. She was shocked. What was more surprising was the feedback I got from her peers after I walked her to the door. Apparently she had been bullying others, telling them that I had empowered her to coach and critique them and was reporting things to me (which was not true). She also indicated that she was being included in important conversations that the others were not (also not true). She was blunt, negative and full of self-importance while putting forward a completely different face to me. When they team heard she was gone they thanked me for removing her from the team sooner rather than later. The company, however, looked only at her sales numbers and felt I should have done something to convince her to stay but I knew that her star was tarnished.
Once she was no longer impacting the team I saw the rest of the team step up. No longer afraid to try things and share best practices between each other the remaining members became something they had not been before, a collaborative team all working at their potential. Numbers didn’t go down, they were just distributed differently.