Tough Call: The arrogant young sales star

Like many LBM dealers, your company has struggled with attracting, hiring, and retaining high-performing young pros. As some of your key team members near retirement age, this situation is becoming increasingly urgent.

Finally, your involvement with the local university’s job fair led to several interviews and two successful hires. The first hire is a young woman with a degree in finance with an emphasis on accounting. She is fitting right in with your back-office team, learning how to transfer what she’s learned in school to the real world of running a business. She is respectful of the people on your team who’ve been there for decades and wants to understand how things have always been done before offering suggestions on how to accomplish tasks more efficiently.

The second one is a young man who studied marketing and sales. He’s a very quick study and is doing a great job with your builder customers. In fact, he was assigned some accounts that hadn’t bought from you in years—and managed to get them going again. “He’s young and doesn’t know everything about our business,” one builder told you. “But he asks a lot of questions and seems to really care about doing right by us. And that means a lot.”

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As positive as the impact is on your clients, he’s having a strongly negative impact on your existing team. “He’s been out of school for less than a year, but thinks he knows everything,” one of your top inside salespeople told you. “It’s a good thing the customers like him, because his arrogant attitude isn’t winning him any friends among his coworkers.”

It’s now been nearly a year since adding these two members of Gen Z to your team, and while your back-office team is working together better than ever, your customer-facing team is disintegrating. You assumed that time would resolve these issues—but if anything, they’ve gotten worse over time. One of your top sales-support team members recently told you, “I’ve been here more than five years, and honestly thought I’d be here forever. But this new young man is making things so miserable, I dread coming to work. I’m hoping you can move me to a different area—one where I wouldn’t work directly with him. Otherwise, I’ll likely start looking for a new job.”

The last thing you want is to lose good people over a personality conflict with a new hire, especially when that new hire is winning back long-lost clients. What would you do?

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Let him go. It doesn’t matter how good the new person is. If top performers on your team are willing to leave because of him, you have no choice but to let him go.
Let them leave. If people on your team are making you choose between them and the new guy, wish them well.
Make it work. Sit down individually with your new sales star and the unhappy existing members of your team, learn what it would take to get them all to work together, then make that happen.
Counseling. Bring in an employment counselor to work with your team, individually and as a group, to try to get them all on the same page.

What would you do?

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