Are your having trouble moving a staff member on?

It’s all very well knowing that you should hire the best people and, putting it bluntly, fire the worst. But in practice it’s hard.

When you know your under performer as a person rather than as a number emotions tend to get in the way.

It’s hard to terminate someone’s employment when you know their wife is expecting their first child or that they are saving up for the holiday of a lifetime.

But for the good of the business you know you need to make a tough decision, so what can help you with the emotional side?

A couple of weeks ago I revisited the notion of a company’s purpose, which is the reason you are in business, the difference you are intent on making to the world.

As CEO your most important role is to put together the right people to deliver your business’s purpose.

You can have the best strategy, wonderful processes and a bank account full of dollars but if you haven’t got the right people to deliver your purpose it won’t happen.

And as your business’s purpose is the driving force behind the business and the whole reason you are putting in the hard work wouldn’t it then be churlish to falter on achieving it because of loyalty to employees who are not the right people?

Some of the best “people CEOs” I have met use this question to sort the wheat from the chaff:

 “Is this the right person to have in the team to enable us to deliver our company’s purpose?”

When you know where the weak links are but are loathe to make tough decisions that question is a powerful reminder of why it needs to be made.

Give it a try, it works.

Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses:Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business”  and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).