16 September 2008

More and more I’m seeing opportunities in business to take average employees and develop them into top performers. Imagine what this does for your bottom line.

I find that companies often push their star performers to squeeze that little bit more out of them, because they know that traditionally these are their employees that are willing to go the extra mile. They’re engaged with their work. They’re motivated.

In all businesses there is a bell curve which employee performance can be inserted. The average performer sits in the middle of this curve, which makes up 60-70 percent of employees.

These employees do enough to get by, don’t cause a stir, but don’t do anything outstanding either. You know they could do a better job, but it seems like you’re hitting your head against a brick wall when you try to motivate them with the techniques that work for your star performers.

In my role I’ve discovered how you can move the middle of this bell curve so your average employees’ performance moves into the top performance area – sending your KPIs through the roof.

Let me share one of my trade secrets to get you started. You need to manage and lead high performers differently from the core performers. And you need to manage and lead core performers differently from low performers.

In terms of high performers we can generally manage them on their results. Because they are consistently achieving the desired results, and because coaching observations typically pick up that they are using the appropriate actions (or behaviours) to do so.

Core performers on the other hand, are not consistently achieving the desired results; and coaching observations typically pick up that they are not consistently using the appropriate actions (or behaviours).

This means that with core performers we have to do two things:

1. Identify the differences in activity and behaviour between high performers and core performers; and then
2. Manage and lead core performers in a manner which encourages them to more consistency use the critical behaviours that distinguish high performers from core performers.

With leadership behaviours instilled your frontline leaders are equipped to motivate and engage your employees. With this step complete you will be well on your way to moving the middle in your business.

More on leadership behaviours another day…