Should You Keep a Toxic Salon Employee Who's Great With Clients?

You've got someone who's wonderful with the clients, but complete poison in the staff room. Do you keep them because they're making money? Today, I'll give you my honest answer. Hello, hello, hello my salon friends. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons, coming all over the internet again with another dose of my Wise Owl wisdom. And this week's episode comes straight from one of you, because a salon owner messaged me recently with this exact problem. And as soon as I heard, I knew this could be a really good episode because lots and lots of salon owners I've worked with have faced some version of it. But first, a message from our August sponsor, Pretty Data. How would you like to delete the spreadsheets for good and still know exactly where you stand financially? Pretty Data connects booking and accounting so it just knows your numbers and you chat with it like your finance bestie. No more digging through reports or chasing your accountant and no more bloody spreadsheets that you hate and never get round to. Start your free trial at prettydata.co. The link's in the notes. So here's roughly what my message was from one of our lovely listeners. It was a salon owner who's taken someone on who on paper was a good hire. Clients like them. Service is genuinely good and the work is solid, but there's an attitude problem. This person was described to me as a whinger, someone who's never happy, someone very negative, someone who has even openly talked in front of the team how they wouldn't mind being out of work as if the job is a favor that they're doing everybody. And the salon owner can start to question whether this is a good thing. Obviously, it's not a good thing, but the salon owner can start to worry about whether this is seeping into the rest of the team. So her question underneath it all was the one in the title. Do you keep someone who clients like and is good at service? And if so, how do I deal with the bad attitude? And I gave my answer and I'm going to give it to you, too, because how you handle this one tells you everything about the kind of salon that you are running. The reason the situation traps people is the talent is a bit like a blindfold.

You look at the takings, you look at the performance and on paper and I've taught you the five things that we look for in a performance review and none of them is whether you're a whinging cow or not. You look at the clients who ask for them by name and your brain does this very convenient sum where good service cancels out bad behavior. Yeah, I know they're hard work, but look at how busy they are and the clients love them. So you tolerate it week after week and you tell yourself that it's a price worth paying. The problem is that sum is wrong because it only counts things that are easy for us to measure the money that the person brings in. It's right there on the screen in front of us. But the damage they're doing is invisible until it suddenly isn't. And I've made this mistake and I made it for far too long. I had someone on my team who was genuinely gifted at the work, genuinely difficult to be around. Moody, undermining, always a negative comment, always a sigh. And I kept them because every time I thought about letting them go, I looked at their column and I lost my nerve. I had another one who was, I mean, at the time I was talking to my husband about this, actually. The town where our salon is, Newbury, has changed so much and it used to be very much a small town mentality. And we had a girl working for us who was related to a lot of our best clients. And I put up with all sorts of crap from her, all sorts of terrible behavior, even being blatantly rude to my face because I was scared. And on paper, she was making good money. But what I didn't clock for a long time was what it was doing for everyone else, what it was doing to the good people, the ones with the right attitude who never gave me the trouble. They were the ones that were quietly suffering. And the atmosphere was being set by my worst behaved person, not by my best behaved person. And eventually it cost me what it always costs you. I started losing the good ones, not the difficult ones. Why do they never go? Why do they never want to leave? Because we were losing the good ones because nobody wants to come to work with someone with a face like a smacked ass. And by the time I finally dealt with it, the damage was already done and it took a long time to rebuild the culture. And that's what we're talking about today to rebuild the culture in that place.

And the lesson I took from it has never left me. You do not get to keep a toxic person and a happy team. You've got to choose. If you're happy for that to be your only team member, maybe that's OK. But if they're working alongside other people and you don't want to lose them, I'm afraid it's going to be a no. So let's get this. Let's count the real cost. The bits that the easy sum misses a genuinely toxic team member doesn't just affect their own work. They set the tone for the entire organization. They give other team members permission to be negative, to clock watch, to whinge, to turn up late. They cost you your best people who have options and will work somewhere else. They cost you your own energy. They cost you the sleep that you're losing at night because you spend your week managing the atmosphere and bracing for the next round of negativity. And in the end, they cost you clients, too, because a sour team is something people can feel the moment they walk in, no matter how good the individual service is. When you add all of that up, that busy column isn't such a bargain. Before you let anyone go, though, here's the honest test. Is this a skills problem or a character problem? Because they're not the same thing and they don't get the same answer. If someone's keen and decent, but not yet good enough at the work, that's a skills problem. And skills, you can coach, you can train, you can support, you can give time. But what we're describing here, the whinging, the openly talking about not caring if they've got a job or not, that steady drip of negativity is not a skills gap. That's an attitude. And attitude is really hard to shift. You can't train someone into wanting to be there. You can't teach someone not to be an asshole. But you do owe them one proper direct grown up conversation before you conclude anything. And this is the advice I gave to the salon owner. No hints, no passive aggressive comments. A clear, calm sit down where you tell them plainly what you're seeing, how it's affecting the team and the impact that you're noticing and what has to change today. Sometimes, occasionally, people genuinely don't realize the effect they're having on the rest of the business. And one honest conversation can start to turn it around. If that happens, brilliant. If that happens, you're in the minority.

But if you have that conversation and nothing changes or nothing changes for long, then you've got your answer. And you can stop telling yourself that things might get better on their own. Now, I need to be clear about something here. I'm a business mentor, but you're listening to a free podcast and I'm not an employment lawyer. If you do reach the point of letting someone go, you've got to do it properly. There's a right process to follow. There's rules about how this is done. Please take proper HR or employment advice before you act. What I'm giving you today is the business judgment, how things should be, how that something ought to be sorted, but you need someone qualified in your corner. So what do you think? What have I missed? How are things going for you? If it cuts through all the agonizing, if a person hands in their notice tomorrow, what would your honest gut reaction be? If it's going to be a feeling of relief, then you already know and you've known for a while. Don't ignore that because gut instinct is very rarely wrong. And the practical first step is that conversation that I've talked about. But please reach out and let me know what's it like employing people. I haven't run a salon team for a few years now. This kind of decision is never really about one person. It's about the kind of business that you're trying to build and who you let shape it and impact it. Now, those are exactly the kinds of questions we work on in my ultimate one to one clarity program over 90 days. We build a five year plan for your life and your business that you actually want. And then we look at the profit and pricing to support it and a marketing plan to get you there. If that sounds like something you could use, reach out, book a strategy call. I'm going to put the link in the description because it's an obscure link and you're never going to remember it. But I'd love to speak to you. The strategy call is free. Let's see if one to one coaching is something useful. If you would like to send in a question for me to cover in a future episode. No promises, you'll get a whole episode, but you'll always get a reply. Phil at buildyoursalon.com is my email address scrolling at the bottom of the screen. I will see you next Friday. And until then, take care.