Sort the team by values and performance, and act on each box

1. Why decide on paper

Without a system, it feels political. Most founders, on this view, have no system for enforcing their culture, so each decision feels random and political. The grid makes the call objective, and setting it down on paper takes the emotion out of it. Leave it undefined and your team will define it for you: they will conclude that you rank results above values.

Where founders fail. Here is where most founders go wrong: they put up with a toxic high performer because the business needs the revenue. That is wrong; the instruction is to fire them, and fast.

What waiting taught one team. In one example, an owner kept a salesperson who beat his quota every quarter while treating the sales operations staff, and basically the rest of the team, badly; the owner felt he was one of those who held others down so he could stand out. The owner put the decision off for months, reasoning it could wait until after the year's final quarter, since a top seller is hard to hire late in the year. What the delay told the whole company, the owner realized later, was that hitting the number mattered more than living the values. He was fired in the end, but not before good people on the teams around him had left, and the turnover cost more than the quota being protected. The owner called it their own mistake: teaching the team through what was done rather than what was said, and not living their own values.

What the culture really is. The view here is that the culture you actually have is made of what you reward, what you recognize and what you put up with; anything else you claim is a flattering story told to yourself and to others. That whatever you tolerate becomes the rule is section 3 of SOP 257 — Name the rules your sales culture reinforces and tolerates. Building a culture in layers from behaviors up, and auditing it, is SOP 258.

A check on who slips past you. Everyone has blind spots. So one practice here is to keep asking the people who work most closely with you whether anyone on the team is getting past you unnoticed. People flatter whoever runs the company, whether they mean to or not. That might be flattering in a good sense, since it would mean they look up to you; or it might not, and maybe all they want is to hold on to their jobs. You cannot tell, but it happens either way.

2. Draw the grid

Values alignment runs up the side, high at the top and low at the bottom. Performance runs across, low on one side and high on the other. Each person lands in one of the boxes.

Box	Performance	Values	The move
Stars	High	High	Promote them and reward them in public (section 3)
Developers	Low	High	Coach them and set clear goals (section 4)
Toxic talent	High	Low	Two instructions differ; see section 5
Move out	Low	Low	Reassign them or exit them without delay (section 6)

"Toxic talent" is a label used here only for the sake of making the box easy to remember.

The grid is one of the simplest tools a company can use, and its simplicity, on this view, is the reason people skip it. The comparison offered is someone told that building muscle takes progressive overload, who then tries every other kind of workout and diet and wonders why nothing changes.

3. Stars: high on both

You want more people like these. Give them promotions, reward them publicly, and hold them up as the example. They carry your culture.

4. Developers: right values, low performance

A lot of people react by wanting to fire them. The answer here is that you will never have everyone arrive ready-made. Plenty of people arrive needing development, and depending on the function, you will have more or less of them. Coach them, train them, and give them time and resources: they grow into stars if you put the investment in. And if the time goes in, their loyalty runs very deep.

A statistic, loosely recalled. There was, it is thought, a statistic, something like this: those who need double the training remain with the company five to six times as long. The training load might feel heavy, but that person will probably stay with you that much longer.

5. Toxic talent: high performance, low values

The instruction. Remove them immediately, whatever their numbers, whatever their impact. They are the reason the people above them on the grid quit: stars go because you keep toxic talent around. If you have someone like this, the promise here is that your best people will be gone within a month or two. A lot of your stars will simply leave without saying why, and often the reason is that you kept this person. One toxic high performer, the warning goes, will cost you three stars; it always happens, sooner or later. Get them out and your whole team performs better.

Two instructions for this box. One instruction is to manage them out or to remediate. The other, the one above, is to remove them immediately regardless of the numbers. One reading leaves room to fix the person; the other does not. This page does not settle which reading is right.

When it is your best person. The objection heard every time is that this is the top salesperson, or the head of operations, or the head of finance. In one example, an owner fired people in each of those roles with no backup except for the owner, and had to step into functions the owner knew nothing about while still running the rest of the business. The advice: you just have to deal with it. When that owner let a top-producing salesperson go, the rest of the team over-performed and made up the shortfall, because they had hated working alongside that person.

The excuses. Failing to let toxic talent go, or failing to reassign or remove people quickly, is in the view here one of the biggest errors a leader makes. Your mind will invent every excuse for keeping them and for why this is wrong; that is a story, and it will not help your company. The fears that flood in are your brain trying to protect you, and they do not help either. You will be fine, on this view, and so will your business.

How to let someone go so that it is never a surprise, and how to arrange who covers their work first, is SOP 153 — Fire without surprise and plan who covers the work.

6. Move out: low on both

Reassign them or exit them quickly. Two lines appear for this box. One gives the choice as an improvement plan or an exit, and says not to waste time on this box; the other is simply to exit them. An improvement plan is fine if writing one makes you feel good, but one practice here is to ask: is the plan being written only so they can be exited? If so, that practice spares them the blow to their ego and the lost time and simply lets them go, because they will not be staying.

7. Run it every quarter

Print the grid, and bring it to each quarterly review to judge where every person on your team sits. In one company, each leader completes it every quarter and hands the result to the owner, who reads each one. The suggestion if you do not do this yet: do it quarterly, and maybe monthly if things are moving fast for you right now.

8. Why this is most of the work

Enforcement comes down to what you reward and what you attach consequences to. Its plainest form is whom you keep, whom you promote, whom you reward and praise in public, and whom you hold up to the team as doing great work. The view here ranks it above every other system for reinforcing a culture: the choices of whom to promote, hire and fire, and the way you coach and develop people. If you could pick a single lever for culture, this is it.

It is also the hardest, so most people avoid it and reach for fancier extras instead: a quarterly bonus scheme, some new form of shout-out, and other things of that kind. On this view, none of that counts while you are keeping poor people on the team and failing to promote and celebrate the great ones. This is the 80 in the 80/20 here; the other 20 comes after.

SOP 168 makes a related point in section 8, on a larger company restating its values: your hiring, promoting and firing choices tell people almost more than your words do. Rewarding values in a steady rhythm is SOP 261 — Build a recognition rhythm that rewards values, not results.

9. Decide whether to develop someone

The questions, in order:

• What skills does the person lack?
• Are those skills you should have hired for, or ones you agreed your team would train and coach? Put another way: did you hire the wrong person, or did you hire them and not see how much coaching it would take?
• If the hire was the mistake, does it make sense to coach this single person up when everyone else on the team already has the skill? The answer here: probably not, honestly.
• If you did agree to train it: are you able to teach it yourself? Have you got the time? If not, does somebody else have both? Where nobody does, maybe your approach is the thing that is wrong.
• If you have both the time and the skill, does it earn its place on your calendar? Could the business and the team get a bigger return if you put that energy somewhere else?
• Where the gap reaches past even their skill set, the question sometimes asked here is whether it is within scope at all.

On your own time. In one example, an owner who likes to invest in people and train them heavily found pulling back from it one of the hardest adjustments to make. As chief executive you cannot spend all your time training; most of the time, the training should be someone else's job. You kind of have to do it yourself when you are small; once the company grows, the time for it is gone, so you find others to take it on.

On scope. The example is someone who has the skill but is unpleasant to deal with. Making people nice, in the view here, is not your job; that is out of scope. Run each case through these tests: does it fall inside your scope, does it deserve your time, and did you sign up for it?

Where this differs from SOP 192. Section 6 of SOP 192 — Hire for the smallest skill gap holds that you can learn to train attitude, and that doing so lets you take on people who are very good at the work but not good with people. Here, making a skilled but unpleasant person nicer is out of scope. This page does not settle which reading is right.

10. When someone has to go

Whatever the reason you have to exit someone, it is, in the view here, almost always your fault: you hired wrongly, you set the wrong expectations, or something else of that kind. Every once in a while someone gets through who fools you completely; in one owner's experience it has happened a couple of times. Still, most of the time the fault is yours, and on this view that is fine. You learn from it, nobody in business is perfect, and you still have to correct course.

That people who will not change have to go, and that this might cost a short-term dip in the business, is section 5 of SOP 257. When someone was trained properly and still falls short, section 6 of SOP 43 — Document, demonstrate, duplicate gives a point at which to cut them.

10.1 When the one to go is a leader

Judge the team, not the leader. If a department keeps underperforming and you cannot see why, the view here is that it is the leader. Do not listen to what they say; look at how their team performs. Polish and plans are not the work; skill shows in results.

Check the record. Line up the business's growth spurts and plateaus against changes in its people. In one example, revenue went flat almost at once after one leader was promoted, and stayed flat until that leader left.

Look a layer down. Leaders hire people who work as they do, so sometimes, after removing one, you have to turn over a whole department. Senior leaders bring people, contacts and vendors that all need untangling.

Expect a lag. By one estimate, a lot of people will not see that the call was right for six months: the team steadies within three months and passes its old baseline by month four or five. It matters more when you are small: with 5, 10 or 15 people, a single person can drag everyone's results down.

11. What this page does not decide for you

• How to judge values alignment. How to score a person's fit with the values, or where high ends and low begins: Not established on this page.
• Which instruction governs toxic talent. Remove at once, or manage out or remediate (section 5). This page does not settle which reading is right.
• What 'immediately' allows. Whether a warning, notice or a chance to improve comes first: Not established on this page.
• How long a developer gets. This page gives no figure for how long to invest before deciding.
• What goes in an improvement plan. Not established on this page.

12. The checklist

Step	What to do
1	Print the grid: values alignment up the side, performance across
2	In every quarterly review, place each person in a box; maybe monthly if things are moving fast, as suggested
3	Stars: promote them, reward them publicly, make examples of them
4	Developers: coach, train, set clear goals, give time and resources; before investing, work through the questions in section 9
5	Toxic talent: remove them regardless of their numbers (a second instruction is to manage them out or remediate: section 5); plan the exit with SOP 153
6	Move out: reassign or exit quickly; an improvement plan is an option (section 6)
7	If you want the habit: keep asking the people closest to you who is slipping past you
8	When someone has to go, remember that on this view the fault is almost always yours; learn from it and correct course
9	When a department underperforms and you cannot see why, look at the leader's team results; after removing a leader, check the layer below, and expect others to see it only months later

13. What this page does not cover

The values themselves, and how to discover which ones you truly live by, belong to SOP 260 — Make your values non-negotiable and find the ones you really hold.

Employment law is not covered on this page.