One of the most difficult, and maybe the most important, decisions you can make is who to keep and who not to keep on your team.

Here is a concept worth thinking about: Your strength and commitment is viewed externally by the strength and commitment of your team. In other words, if your team seems uncommitted and doesn’t produce results, or even if they don’t have the right attitude, that reflects on you.

How many times have you gone to a chain department store, or restaurant and received a completely different service experience than at a sister franchise store. Maybe the servers just seem happier and more eager to please than at the other location. If you receive particularly poor service at one location, who do you blame? The people or the manager?

I live in a community where there are two retail technology stores of the same franchise within 10 minutes of each other. After several “I don’t care” or “you are an interruption to my work” attitudes from staff at the closest one, I always drive the extra 10 minutes to go to the sister location. I absolutely blame the management at the one store. It wasn’t always the same person serving me but it was always the same attitude. The sister store is like a different company altogether. I credit the management.

Let’s relate that example to how you are perceived based on the performance of your team. If you are in a mid to large company, you are surrounded by people at the same level that are judged by the teams they support. It’s not only important to the company that you “cull” your team and keep only the strongest, most eager and most capable, it’s important to you!

Netflix senior management uses “The Keeper Test”: Which of my people, if they told me they were leaving for a similar job at a peer company, would I fight hard to keep?

It’s likely that most of us have been in positions where we keep someone on for compassionate reasons hoping that the situation will improve.

Recognizing that we’ve hired this person and we have an accountability – if not legal or through some collective agreement, then certainly ethically – to help this person perform. We need to sit down with this person and figure out what the issue is. Whether it be training or capability, and work with that person to resolve. If that doesn’t work, maybe there is another position elsewhere that they would be suited for. If that isn’t a possibility, then it’s your obligation – to the company and to yourself to let that person go. Not fun, nor easy, but necessary.

Failure to do so isn’t fair to the other peer workers or the client or customer that is the benefactor of this person’s production.

You need to either correct, or fire for poor performance, and you need to fire for poor attitude. There are three broad qualifiers you use when hiring someone: are they ready, willing, and able to do the job. Ready speaks to their toolkit of education and experience. Willing speaks to attitude and desire to do the job. Able speaks to the hard-skills they need to perform the tasks. If you hire for these three things, if any of them fail, you need to either correct, or fire for the same reasons. Either they aren’t truly ready by not being able to apply their education or previous experience, or their personality isn’t right for the environment, or they simply aren’t up to the task.

One of the hardest things to do is to let someone go who is a nice person and who is really trying. I’ve had the displeasure of firing several people in my career for a variety of reasons, but that situation is always the hardest. I remember one time I had an employee that was “just the peach of the earth” kind of person – always smiling and she had a great attitude. Unfortunately, she was in a junior level job and simply couldn’t handle the tasks. I tried several things including asking her what she needed, giving her additional training and a significant amount of coaching. She just couldn’t do it and there was no place else to transfer her. She was a single mom and really needed the job. I had to let her go. This is the only time I ever cried when firing someone but it had to be done. I continue to have admiration and respect for her as a person but she was bringing the rest of the team down and overall performance was suffering as a result. When I look back, this really wasn’t a tough decision from an operational perspective. It was only tough from a personal perspective. When faced with these decisions, it’s essential that you be pragmatic. Be professional, understanding, and respectful but get it done.

Let me leave you with one final analogy. A while back I decided to clean-up my computer to make more room and hopefully speed things up. Regular maintenance kind of stuff. When I went to empty the trash, there were 1.6 million files in it. It took two days of sluggish performance on my computer to perform this piece of maintenance. The analogy to keeping your team slim, trim and “maintained” here can’t be too subtle. If you prolong the inevitable and allow poor performers to accumulate, when the “urgency” comes to do something about it, it will be all consuming. React quickly, be personal, sympathetic and professional but make it happen and move on.

Part of your reputation is based on who you hire and who you fire.