I’ve come across an employee a few times that I deem to be a “mercenary”. This is an individual who produces good work but takes an entirely transactional view of their role. Likely, they are misaligned or uncaring about the organization’s broader vision and exclusively care about achieving goals for their own purposes as opposed to accomplishments for the benefit of their team or the company. Importantly, this person may be entirely likeable and easy to work with; this is not the prototypical ‘brilliant jerk’, which is routinely discussed.

Reconciling what to do about the Mercenary can be extremely challenging. Not only are they seemingly producing high-quality work and accomplishing goals, but they get along well with others. So, what’s the problem? Inevitably, once they no longer perceive sufficient benefit in the transaction, they will leave, and when they do, they will leave behind a Beverly Hills sized walk-in closet of skeletons. If someone is entirely self-interested, they will take every single shortcut to achieve their goals as quickly as possible, often at the expense of longer-term considerations. Over a brief period, this can be misleadingly positive. Many of these minor short-cuts and trade-offs will be hidden, but unfortunately, they will compound over time. And once they are gone, the effort required to clean up the unintentional negative consequences can be material.

Here is a practical and well-known example:

• You have a Sales person or executive who realizes that committing to unrealistic deliverables, or embellishing (but not lying) will help her win more. So she does it regularly and closes many deals. Awesome. Fast forward six months, and those customers are now disappointed in what they purchased and end up leaving for a competitor shortly thereafter. And of course, by the time those unhappy customers start surfacing, she’s on to her next gig. It can be tempting to turn a blind eye to the behavior even when you’re aware of it because of the results, but the long-term negative repercussions will certainly come back to bite you.

Usually, it’s fairly apparent when you have this type of employee on your team. As hard as it can be to reconcile, it’s important to either engage with and develop alignment with them or cut your losses.  

One trend I’ve observed over time is high performing employees are particularly drawn to quantifiable and objective measures of performance. That seems intuitive. You sort of expect those who take pride in their work and want to excel at it to want measurable proof as validation. I initially assumed this to be driven by external forces: those who are great want to be able to show they are great and receive the external recognition and validation that comes with that. While there’s probably some truth to that, the desire for objective performance measures goes far beyond. Below are additional reasons I’ve noticed.

1. Clarifies expectations and accountability. When targets are clear and measurable, there’s less room for misinterpretation between an employee and boss. Great employees want to know what is required to be excellent.
   
   
2. Validation of improvement. Using a measurable performance metric over time can validate you’re consistently getting better. The same way it’s satisfying to set a new best personal best half-marathon time, it’s satisfying to validate you are consistently improving your output at work. That is for intrinsic reasons.
   
   
3. Relative performance. Using consistent, objective measurement ensures a manager is aware of who is performing on a team and who is not. From my experience, it’s extremely frustrating when you have a colleague, or worse a boss, who is performing really poorly and you aren’t sure if anyone else realizes. Having more objective measures provides some relief that poor performance will be surfaced and hopefully addressed.
   
   
4. Facts over feelings. When performance is being measured objectively, there’s less concern that favouritism or feelings are strongly influencing performance outcomes on a team.
   

It’s not always possible to quantify success measures in every role. In those cases, the more objective you can make the qualitative measure (e.g., think “SMART” goals), the better.

One of the most challenging performance management situations occurs when you have an employee who is genuinely putting forth their best effort but still can’t meet the expectations of the role. These ones hurt. When someone isn’t capable and doesn’t care to put any effort in, it’s easy to act. But when the engagement and caring is high, it’s natural to feel a strong desire and obligation to help.

Unfortunately, if you’ve exhausted all your training strategies and the capabilities simply aren’t there, at some point you need to accept that allowing an individual to strive for success and not succeed inhibits them from finding an alternative role where they can truly thrive. While true in all challenging employee performance situations, it’s particularly important in these cases to remind yourself of this point.