Underperformance and misalignment don’t just hurt the bottom line; they risk losing high-performers.
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Harvey Mackay, author of Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive, said something that is perhaps ever truer today as it was then. “It isn’t the people you fire who make your life miserable. It’s the people you don’t.”
If you have an underperforming employee (or more), you can’t afford to wait to have a conversation with them, a serious one. Researchers from CultureAmp standardized the rating scales of 741 companies and over 200,000 employees. Employees who were defined and rated by their managers and peers as being in that organization’s bottom performance bucket made up the “under performers” group. Depending on the organization, underperforming employees typically make up between 0 and 20 percent of the workforce. The average is 4 percent.
Employees working remotely create even more problems because those problems and the causes can take more time to spot, and time has a price tag on it. We in managerial positions have a widespread shortage of qualified team members. Retention is crucial. Pruning out the non-performers is equally important to the future of your company. No one wants to fire an employee; I don’t want to fire an employee, but now more than ever, we have to fight to keep the performers on our team.
Underperforming Types
Praveen Andapalli, Forbes Councils Member and CEO of Vitel Global Communications and Varun Digital Media, points out that there are two types of underperforming employees. One type has performed well since being on-boarded, but suddenly, there is something wrong with their performance. The second type has never performed.
Perhaps you want to give the first type of underperformer a little time, but you don’t have time, and every day you wait to discover the cause of the problem and to take action is costing you performance, money, and morale.
Will You Be Better Off Without Them?
In an article for Forbes, Global CEO coach and keynote speaker Sabina Nawaz, suggests envisioning the future with the troublesome individual replaced. “Imagine the scenario if someone new—whom you have personally hired and have confidence in—comes in to replace your (employee). Fast forward six months. Will all problems have magically disappeared, or are some of the same issues still recurring? If it’s the latter, the challenge is not (just) the person; other dynamics are in play.”
Still, you won’t know this until you talk to the person and address that elephant in the room.
The late Jack Welch, one of the most admired and most controversial leaders of the last century, believed in the 20-70-10 rule of ranking workers (good, average, and poor). I am a huge fan of Welsh, and how he approached talent management (in terms of intentionality, performance, potential, and development). It wasn’t rank and yank. He expected communication with those in the bottom 10 percent, telling them what is expected, telling them what to fix, and giving them plenty of runway to make progress. If that doesn’t work, they were working in the wrong place. People and performance are directly related. During Welch’s tenure as CEO, General Electric’s value rose 4,000 percent. That is not a typo.
The cold, hard reality is that people leave leaders, not companies. Mike Myatt, founder of N2Growth and widely regarded as “America’s Top CEO Coach”, wrote in his book, Hacking Leadership, about his findings from surveys in companies where he has worked. Your colleagues, in most organizations, would tell you these four disturbing facts (if you took the trouble to ask them):
- More than 40 percent don’t respect the person they report to
- More than 50 percent say they have different values than their employer
- More than 60 percent don’t feel their career goals are aligned with the plans their employers have for them
- More than 70 percent don’t feel appreciated or valued by their employer.
Organizations are simply a collection of people. People drive results, so organizational issues are people issues. If only one cog (person, leader, team member) is performing inconsistently with expectations (whether they be behaviors, tasks, metrics, attitude, strategy, or operations, among many others), they drag down the entire team. They drag down the operating unit. They can drag down the whole organization. If they report to you, they will drag you down with them.
The research shows that leaders with higher IQs struggle with making these decisions more than the rest. Overthinking and over-analyzing get in the way. You will never have all the data. You will never have the entire picture colored in (especially if you are a CEO). You know what to do, so do it now.
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