Trimming the fat

Selim A. Bassoul, chairman and CEO, The Middleby Corp.

It’s never easy letting people go, but it’s
worse to let a bad person bring your company down. In his push to take Middleby
Corp. from its $100 million plateau to
more than $500 million in sales, Selim A.
Bassoul addressed those tough personnel
decisions honestly and fairly to help his
company turn around.

With all due respect to Jack Welch,
Bassoul went beyond just looking to
cut his bottom 10 percent.

“Most people talk about, ‘Oh this person
is not performing; we take out 10 percent
of the nonperformers,’” he says. “Of
course, if they’re not performing, you
should take them out, but it’s tougher to
take out people who are performing, but
they are whiners.”

So whom do you take out besides the
nonperformers? Four personalities
Bassoul describes as the whiner, the
sniper, the passive-aggressive and the
contaminator. Fittingly, the names of all
four tell you what you’re looking for.

“The whiner is the person who every
day whines about everything,” Bassoul
says. “‘The weather isn’t good; the coffee
isn’t good.’ The sniper is the person who
snipes at everybody else. ‘I can’t do my
job because accounting didn’t give me
that’ — they have to go. The passive-aggressive can tell you everything you
want to hear, and then a month later,
they’ve done nothing. And then the contaminator: Those people have a history
in the company. They are smart, but they
use that to build arguments to prove
you’re wrong instead of working to
make it successful.”

Cutting those people will leave you with
only employees that Bassoul refers to as
game-changers and plug-and-play people —
employees that are autonomous and self-driven. But that still might not take away
the sting from managers who have to deliver the bad news. At Middleby, Bassoul
helped take the burden off his leaders by
padding the company’s severance package.
Today, the company gives people one
month of severance pay for each year they
worked at the company.

“It took me a long time to convince my
board that (good severance pay) needs to
occur because then you free people to
take people out,” he says. “A lot of people
expect managers to fire people and give
them one week per year. You know what,
nobody is going to do much unless they
are forced to because they feel guilty.”