Leaders step out in front, which is an ideal place to be criticized. Leaders take responsibility, which attracts people looking for someone to blame. Leaders make change, which makes a lot of people mad. Leaders announce “I’m starting this” which is often followed by “It didn’t work.” Leaders trust team members, some of whom will drop the ball, lie, steal, or worse.

Sometimes leaders are mistreated by the very people they took on all of the above for. Sometimes being a leader is no fun at all. Sometimes I question whether leadership is worth it.

If your goals are safety from criticism and freedom from responsibility, leadership will disappoint you.

If your goals are influence and opportunity to do things that matter, leadership will multiply your efforts like nothing else can.

If your goals are influence and opportunity and safety and freedom, it’s not gonna happen.

As for me, I want to live a life of influence and difference-making more than I want to live a comfortable life. So yes, I say leadership is worth it.

A few days after I wrote the previous post “On Hiring Well”, I made one of my least successful hires of all time. Within days of confidently selecting that candidate it became clear it wasn’t a fit, and we had to let the person go.

These hiring “fails” happen in every business, and more often than I’d like in mine. I think it’s worth drawing a few lessons from them.

When you realize you’ve made a hire that isn’t going to be a success, it’s really important to act quickly to correct the situation. Healthy organizational cultures quickly identify who fits and who doesn’t. Respectfully and appropriately send the person out the door and on the way to a job that will be a better fit for him or her.

Ask what did we miss, and how we could we see that in future candidates before we hire them? What else did we learn?

Don’t beat yourselves up. Examine your interviewing process, but remember sometimes you can ask all the right questions and still not know how a candidate will work out until you see them in action.

Realize you aren’t going to have a 100% success rate, and you don’t need to. Do-overs may not be ideal, but they are available, and they are way better than keeping someone who doesn’t fit in your organization long term.