Early on, at one of my first companies, we had someone running client delivery who was really good. The projects were green. He was liked, he had been with us for quite some time, and he carried a lot. What he was actually doing was managing the reporting rather than the work. Problems got rounded down. By the time we found out what state those projects were really in, we paid for it big time.
In the last two weeks I have had the same conversation twice, at two different startup events, with two founders who did not know each other. Same shape both times. There is a person on the team who is genuinely good in some areas. In others they are immovable. They absorb a disproportionate share of everyone’s energy, meetings exist because of them, decisions get routed around them, and nothing about any of it would survive being written down as a reason. Both founders had been living with it for about a year.
Here is what I think is going on, my version before anyone else’s. Letting someone go is a certain loss. It is immediate, it is visible, and you can picture every hour of it. The hole in the team. The clients who ask. The week of awkwardness. What you get instead is vague, slow and hypothetical. So you do what people do. You work harder to protect a loss of say five than to go and earn fifty.
Barry Staw showed in 1976 that when a course of action starts producing bad outcomes, decision makers often commit more to it rather than less, and the effect is strongest where the decision maker chose it in the first place. Or in other words: if you hired the person, it predicts that you, specifically, will hold on longer than anyone who inherited them would.
That challenge is worth sitting with, because of where it points. Some researchers argue that what gets called loss aversion is better described as aversion to change. Not losses weighing more than gains. It is a preference for the arrangement that already exists, whatever it is.
I don’t say cutting at the first friction. That builds a company nobody sensible wants to join, and it is not what I told either founder. What I said was this: Confront it, in decency, head on. Say the actual thing rather than the softened version, and say it to the person rather than about them. Then put a clock on it. Either both sides change, and change quickly, because one sided change is not change, or you part properly. Both of those are respectful.
The question I keep asking myself about my own case is what kept me from acting sooner, and the honest answer took years to say out loud. It was not that the decision was hard. I knew long before I moved. At the time I shied away from the conversion to be had.
