A Judas in the Mix: The Personnel Question You Cannot Answer in Advance

I met with three different business leaders in the same week and all three were wrestling with the same question.

How am I supposed to pour into somebody who might be taking advantage of me?

One of them is carrying the weight of a decision he made about a person a while back and still can't put it down. He genuinely cannot tell whether he's watching somebody change or watching himself get worked.

Another one wondered what happens if we build all this into our people and then they leave.

The third one is just tired of being the guy who cares the most about everybody else's life.

Let me start with the anger you might feel if you're in this position, because everyone skips past it and it doesn't go anywhere when you do.

The anger is fair. You did go above and beyond for that person. They probably did take some of it for granted. You're not imagining the asymmetry, and I'm not going to talk you out of it or tell you to lead from a place of abundance. I don't find that helpful, and neither do you.

Here's what I'd tell you instead. The question you're asking can't be answered in advance, and the years you'll spend trying to answer it are the years you don't develop anybody.

No test tells you which people will take advantage of you. There's no interview question, there's no assessment, there's no gut feeling that's right often enough to build on. You will guess wrong in both directions. You'll pour into somebody who burns you, and you'll hold back from somebody who would have run through a wall for you.

I keep coming back to how Jesus did this, because it's the most reckless personnel decision in history and it worked. He picked 12 men. One of them sold him. One of them denied he'd ever met him. All of them ran off when it got hard. He knew. And on the last night, he still got down on the floor and washed all 24 feet, Judas included.

He didn't build a filter to find the safe ones. He built something worth being in and let people reveal themselves inside it.

You're going to have a Judas in the mix. And you're going to have a Peter who just cannot get it through his head. And if you spend your energy trying to screen them out on the front end, you'll screen out your best people too, because the best ones will look risky early.

So when somebody says to me, "Chris, what if I invest all this in them and they leave?" I give them the Richard Branson answer: "What if you don't, and they stay?"

And when somebody tells me only about 30% of their people really go deep with it, I tell them that's great news. Thirty percent is how you get a leadership bench. Nobody has ever gotten a hundred.

None of this means you hand people a blank check. You put a price on the door. A defined thing, with a scope and a number and a date, agreed out loud before anybody starts. Then you don't have to know what's in their heart, because you get to watch what they do with a clear agreement. That's what lets you stay generous without being a mark, and it's the only version of this I've seen hold up.

The reason this one runs so hot, though, is that it isn't really a business problem. When somebody takes advantage of you, it doesn't land like a bad quarter. It lands like a verdict on you, on whether you're a fool, whether you're too soft, whether you've got what it takes. That's what keeps you up at night, and it's why you pull back from the next person who needs you.

So you don't need to get better at spotting them. You need to get to where one of them can't take you out of the game for a year. That part is measurable, and we built the instrument that measures it.

The Identity Fear Quotient® (IFQ®) is that instrument. Four questions, 15 minutes. It names the leader you are at your best, the fear that distorts that leader under pressure, and what your team experiences on each side of that line. It will not tell you who your Judas is. It will tell you why one of them can take you out of the game for a year, which is the part you can actually change.

Take the IFQ® at sightshift.com/ifq.