Retrain, Repurpose, or Replace?

Retrain, Repurpose, or Replace?

Terry Dockery, Ph.D.

I regularly coach leaders to higher levels of success, but trying to get folks to change their behavior is not always the best path to better business results. 

Much of our behavior is driven by emotional stuff we aren't even aware of, and these subconscious emotional drivers sometimes aren't easily changed by rational coaching. Our subconscious emotional makeup was largely formed when were children, and these emotional drivers were designed to help us adapt to the world in which we grew up. 

Asking people to change some of their deep seated feelings about surviving in the world in order to pursue a goal higher up the need hierarchy can be a tall order. For example, teamwork might not come easily to someone because they feel afraid to trust other people, but they have no real understanding of why. 

This is all to say that folks aren't always good candidates for coaching. You have 3 basic options when someone isn't performing as you'd like: 

1. Retrain: coach them up in the technical or soft skills they lack. Example: leadership training for someone with leadership potential. 

2. Repurpose: change their role to one that better fits their passions and talents. Example: moving someone out of a management role into a technical role. 

3. Replace: remove them from your organization because they don't have the basic values and foundational skills needed to succeed. Example: removing someone who doesn't have good basic self-care skills and is chronically unhappy (to reduce these painful and expensive situations, improve your hiring process). 

Get in touch if you'd like to talk more about this: (770) 993-1129, tdockery@theresolvefirm.com