How Startups Fix Their People Problems

You can fix them, ignore them, or fire them. But which do you do when?

At some point, every startup will have at least one employee who threatens the success of the company. What do you do with this person?

The issue might be a loss of motivation, maybe a lack of growth, or it could just be a shift in attitude that has made them toxic to everyone around them.

The solution is far from simple.

Yeah, you wish you could just fire them, but that’s not as clean as it sounds in your head when you’re driving to work. First of all, firing is one of the hardest things you’ll ever have to do. Furthermore, when you’re a startup, every hand on the deck counts, and there’s never a good time to lose two of them. Finally, there was a reason you hired this person, and second-guessing sucks.

Look, you’ve got a broken employee. You don’t need to fix the person. But you do need to fix the problem. You can survive mistakes and lean times and external forces, but you can’t survive threats coming from the inside.

How Did We Get Here?

This is not an uncommon problem in any workplace, especially in startup. Here are the causes I usually uncover: