The Employee Who Isn’t Thriving
If you can keep plants alive, you’re probably good at understanding ppl and figuring out the conditions under which they thrive. Conversely, if you kill plants, you might want to ask if you’re killing your team 
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.Sidebar: I have 47 plants. Only ONE is actively dying. I’m as perplexed by this one plant as I am excited about my other 46! I cannot figure out why this plant is struggling. I’ve given her everything I can think of and changed her environment, and she’s dropping leaves. I don’t know what to do to get this plant to thrive. Despite my investment of energy in her, I’m debating whether I want to give her to someone else or keep trying until she dies. I’m wondering if she can make it until spring and whether that’ll give us a new beginning………..never mind the fact that I bought her during summer and she has never been as glorious in my house as she was in the store. Perhaps I should accept that I cannot create an environment that will give her what she needs.
How many of us have situations like this with employees? Are you trying everything you can think of and the situation continues to decline? You know the plant, ahem, the employee is capable of stunning work, but they aren’t showing up on your team that way?
It’s okay to give the plant away and find a new home for it. Far too often, we wait until the relationship becomes toxic to rehome the plant. We let the relationship get so bad that we cannot give the person a decent reference. We wait until we get angry.
Why not create your internal checklist or process that enables you to give away the plant before it’s all but dead?
