Q & A Table of Contents
I Can't Use Him, But I Don't Want To Lose Him
From: Wijoyo Jarkarta, Indonesia
Question: I live in Jakarta, Indonesia. I'm a General Manager of a business entity with 45 personnel in total and I am in charge of the whole operation and responsible for the profitability of the company.
I have a problem with one of the managers. He was a sales manager, but due to his poor performance, I've just reassigned him to marketing with the intention of breaking his influence over the sales people. After the reassignment, he still has informal influence over the people anyway. My objective is to stop him from disturbing the newly-recruited sales manager from doing his job. I don't mind even if he doesn't give positive a contribution to the company as long as he doesn't commit vandalism.
As a matter of fact, he's the one who recruited the best performing sales people. Firing him is not a wise solution because the best sales people will follow him. If I lose the sales people, my BATNA is even worse. How should I deal with this situation?
Response: Your former sales manager should be given the opportunity to spend his time and talents working on a variety of projects that take effort and require that he report to you with great frequency. For example, you could assign him the job of developing a marketing plan which includes short- and long-term objectives. The plan should include a 'snapshot' of your company's current situation as well as means for measuring progress towards achieving the objectives in the new marketing plan.
Your former sales manager may have lost his own capacity to produce sales, but he should be treated as a source of information about the past as well as a source of ideas for the future. Perhaps he should do research on the needs of your existing clients and what your company can do to attract new clients. If he becomes your confidential advisor on marketing, growing the business, product refinement and design, and other matters, that may take up enough of his time to keep him out of trouble.
It could make sense to give him a new office that is remote (distance, communications, or whatever) from the sales department.
In other words, you need to be creative and imaginative to find a way to solve the problem. Perhaps you should ask him about his goals and what he wants to do with his future. For all you know he is desperate to play golf every day -- and if that is the case, perhaps he could retire early as a reward for his past services.
Open you mind to the variety of choices you and he can make -- and hopefully you will have a chance to keep the apparent problem from becoming more serious.
Good luck,
Steve
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