A top manager understands that creating the right environment for their team is one of the most impactful things they can do to drive performance. Setting and maintaining the right culture within the team is the most effective way to do this. While the top performers help you drive ambition and aspiration in your team, the low performers are vital in setting the foundations of your culture. However, because dealing with low performers tends to be the less pleasant side of management, most managers will try to avoid it, and as a result create an environment that over time will erode the culture they aspire to create.
Because the low performers represent the boundary conditions for your team - i.e. they are what the minimum viable team member is, they are critical to the culture of the team because they are a walking, talking example of not what is great, but rather what is allowable. Thus, being intentional and disciplined on how to deal with low performers becomes a powerful tool in setting and maintaining culture.
Cultivating low performers is like tending to the weeds of your garden - while weeds will always exist, some weeds are much more harmful to your garden than others. Similarly, low performers will always exist (statistically, someone is always the lowest), but while some are harmless, others will erode and destroy the culture you wish to nurture.
An example: one common thing you hear is that as teams grow larger, the culture erodes. This is not due to the behavior of top performers, nor is it due to the actions of the middle, but rather the mismanagement of the low performers. As teams grow, managers increase their surface area, and instead of being opinionated on what they spend time on, they spread themselves thin by trying to do more. Usually, dealing with low performers becomes a lower priority since the immediate impact from this group is low, and the manager ends up focusing time on immediate opportunities and fires.
However, the cultural erosion from low performers is a compounding effect. The rest of the team still sees and interacts with them everyday, and over time realizes that they could be doing far less and still be okay. This low performing culture eventually becomes the norm for the team, and the culture that the manager intended to grow is destroyed. By the time the manager gets around to dealing with the low performers, the damage is already done - it is no longer a personnel problem, but a cultural one.
Thus, by not weeding the garden, the manager doesn’t just let the few weeds grow, but lets the entire garden perish.
At the heart of this, being a low performer is usually not an issue of poor results alone, but an issue of the behaviors that led to those poor results. As a result, targeting behavior directly and using results as a feedback mechanism is the most effective way to work with low performers. The three steps of cultivating low performers are setting the critical behaviors you want for the team, then evaluating and actioning on your low performers based on these behaviors:
Define the critical behaviors for your team. Critical behaviors are not aspirational behaviors, but rather the essential behaviors that all team members are expected to have. Setting and articulating these behaviors is useful because they create clarity for the team, so they don’t need to guess what is allowable or not. This certainty helps not only with your low performers, but will give comfort to your entire team that they know the rules of the game.
Evaluate your low performers and provide them feedback. No one should be surprised that they are considered a low performer, and giving feedback allows you to set expectations, as well as get an understanding about their perspective. Remember that no one’s goal is to be a low performer, so having empathy for them while articulating your standards will help you get to the best possible outcome.
Taking action on your low performers. The way your low performer responds to feedback will be the clearest signal you have on what to do. Sometimes all someone needs is help identifying their blind spots, while others will refuse to listen.
By cultivating your low performers, you send a clear, concrete message to your team on what the team values are.
Setting Critical Behaviors
Defining and setting critical behaviors is the most important part of cultivating low performers. It allows you to articulate what behaviors you deem essential to be performant on your team, and create clarity for your team so they can adjust to this. Most importantly, it allows you to define low performers as those who do not exhibit one or more of these critical behaviors, which are measurable over time. That is, this creates a standard for what low performance means, and is not something that is based on your whims.
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