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“You need to meet your revenue numbers,” I said to our VP Sales, “Tommy”. Tommy had been on the job for about one month and already things were going sideways.
“Well, okay,” Tommy responded.
That’s not exactly the awe-inspiring response you want from your sales lead. Tommy didn’t seem to care. It was as if he expected to fail.
I knew, in fact I already knew, that Tommy wasn’t going to succeed as our VP Sales. I couldn’t stand Tommy. His attitude just sucked.
A bad attitude is at the top of my list of traits of the bad employees I’ve hired over the years. Here are the other common traits of the bad employees I’ve hired. You can almost be guaranteed that your bad hires will have at least one of these qualities:
A. Your worst hires will lack integrity.
“I was speaking to someone at the gym who works at Maxim (or biggest competitor), and she already knew that you put everyone on minimum wage,” Tommy said to me the Monday after we had put the staff on minimum wage the previous Friday.
Moving the team to minimum wage for six weeks was a necessary step to keep the company alive. If we didn’t take this step, our investors would have shut the company down.
