In corporate America, there is a chain of command always assessing where it can improve its organization’s efficiency. Making up each level of that organization, there are the employees who are responsible for producing results, all contributing to the total linked performance of the company.

Undoubtedly, some employees will either strengthen or weaken that performance link, thus their place in the company will need to be reevaluated, not because they’re terrible but because their strong suit may lie elsewhere in a different assigned role.

Whether you’re running a corporation or not, the same applies to businesses – large and small. Each worker comes with a varying degree of unique skills sets, and will either make or break what specifically needs to be accomplished.

As a manager, a leader, or a business owner, you need to know where the weak links are and decide who is going to work best with what overall. In that regard, you need to focus on the bigger picture when it comes to the notion of managing people and running the business properly.

Whether to let someone go, will be determined after you have gone through these simple three steps:

STEP 1: Specific Impeccable Delegation

Anybody managing a team should live and breathe the value of impeccable delegation. Take into consideration who you want to work with.

• What do you expect from people? What tasks should be assigned to whom? How should they respond to what you’re doing, and where do you want them to work?

You need to identity “specificities,” and not just talk in terms of “superficialities.” Provide concrete criteria for what a person needs deliver on.

STEP 2: Weekly Update Reports

Ask workers to submit weekly reports. “What did you do this week?” is a question that everyone should have an answer to. Each week, managers should have a handle on what their workers did, and they should have a solid idea of how things are progressing.

With the weekly report, you can see who is working on what, and whether or not they are getting things done. If an individual is incapable of writing up such simple report about what they are doing on a weekly basis, then a serious talk with them will need to be attended to.

STEP 3: Weakest Link Removal

Every employer’s work should regularly be critiqued so as to know what each person has been accomplishing, either through or without a weekly report. When you detect someone’s performance is not conducive to your goals, then it becomes a critical moment of trying to set them right back on track by giving back their performance evaluation with expectation needing to be met by upcoming weeks. Let it be known this is the final straw.

If you don’t see progress within a week or two, and they’re still displaying their same shortcomings without any attempt at improvement, then you will need to let them go. Do not let any weak link overstay and risk breaking the whole chain.