The Grass Was Never Greener

You didn't have a bad one.

You had an untrained one.

There's a difference, and it just cost you.

I was working with someone who'd hired help, decided the help wasn't good enough, and swapped her out.

Nitpicky things.

Small friction.

Nothing she could point to and call a real failure, just a sense that it should be smoother than this.

So she went and got someone new.

And now she watches a guy down the hall funding deal after deal with the exact person she let go.

Same woman.

Same skills.

Different result.

Nothing about the person changed.

What changed was who was standing over her, and whether that person bothered to teach her anything.

Once the sting wore off, she admitted something.

The one she let go used to go past her hours.

Answer things she wasn't being paid to answer.

Chase the follow-up nobody asked her to chase.

She'd read that as baseline.

It wasn't baseline, it was somebody handing her more than she'd paid for, every day, quietly.

And she filed it under normal and went looking for better.

You only find out what you had after somebody else has it.

That's the expensive way to learn what good looks like.

Then look at the pattern.

The best assistants in that whole company all trace back to the same handful of people.

Not the smartest hires.

The ones trained by people who actually train.

That's not a talent pool.

It's a mirror.

Want to know how good your people are?

Look at how good you've been at making them good.

Those two numbers tend to match.

So when someone underperforms, you get one of two stories.

Either they're the wrong person, clean, blameless, nothing required of you.

Or they're an untrained person, which means the work is yours and you haven't done it.

The first story is more comfortable.

It's also usually wrong.

And swapping is seductive because it feels like decisive leadership.

Cut the weak link.

Move on.

But nothing got solved.

You handed a trained asset to whoever comes next and started over at zero, with someone who'll frustrate you in exactly the same ways, for exactly the same reason.

The grass isn't greener over there.

Somebody over there just waters it.

So think about who you've written off lately.

Were they actually bad at it?

Or did you just never teach them, and call it a personnel problem?