What if you could double the number of star employees working at your company? And what if you could do it without having to hire any additional people? That’s exactly what you’ll get if you start transforming your middle performers into high performers.
Unfortunately, there’s a widespread and deeply wrong belief that middle performers lack the innate talent to become star employees. While there are certainly some people who’ve maxed out their talent, the vast majority of middle performers have more than enough talent to become high performers.
Developing middle performers is one of managers’ weakest skills. In a new study from Leadership IQ, The Leadership Skills Gap, more than 3,000 managers rated their leadership proficiency. And only 26% of leaders said that they had advanced or expert skills in developing middle performers into high performers.
By contrast, 39% of leaders rated themselves as having intermediate skills, an additional 17% considered themselves advanced novices, and 11% rated themselves struggling novices. The rest either had no experience or were beginners.
Here’s the shocker, however; it doesn’t take years of coaching to learn how to develop middle performers. In fact, if you ask your managers to conduct the following exercise, you’ll quickly unlock the potential of a great many middle performers.
First, ask yourself what skills or attitudes really differentiate middle from high performers in your company. Are high performers more proactive than middle performers? Better team players? More tenacious? More empathic? It doesn’t matter what those characteristics are, as long as you can pinpoint three or five attributes that really differentiate high from middle performers.
Second, take one of those characteristics and identify specific behaviors that would indicate great work versus behaviors that would just be good work. This is a little tricky, so here’s an example.
Imagine that the best people in my company embrace change while middle performers merely tolerate change. If I think about specific change behaviors that are merely good versus those that are really great, I might come up with the following:
- Good Work: This person openly supports change initiatives and expresses support. They volunteer to work on change projects, including pilot projects.
- Great Work: This person does all the Good Work behaviors, and then they also encourage and convince their fellow employees to support change initiatives. When they see someone who is resisting the change effort, they reach out to them directly and persuade them to buy into the change.
Notice how both the good and great behaviors involve supporting the change, but then the great behaviors go a step further. The people performing the great behaviors don’t just support the change themselves; they work to convince others to embrace the change. Also, notice how there isn’t an insurmountable difference between good and great work. In other words, it’s really only a little extra effort to take a good behavior and turn it into a great one.
Let’s take another example:
- Good Work: When the change effort gets difficult, and mistakes get made, this person doesn’t blame the change or leadership and instead focuses on specific actions that they do control without blaming others.
- Great Work: This person does all the Good Work behaviors, and then they also redirect conversations with their colleagues to stop them from making excuses or blaming others (like the change effort or leadership).
Again, notice that the good behaviors are fine but that the great behaviors move beyond one’s personal actions to help others embrace change. And note that it’s not going to require more innate talent to move from good to great work; it’s only going to take a little extra effort and attention.
These examples use a technique called Word Pictures to identify the specific behaviors that differentiate good and great work. And once you’ve figured out what really separates the work done by middle performers from work done by high performers, it’s a simple task to teach those differences.
Have every manager conduct a one-on-one conversation with each middle performer and say, “You’re doing really good work, and I’m deeply appreciative of what you do. I also want to tell you that I believe you’ve got tremendous potential to turn that good work into great work. Would you be open to me sharing some of the differences between good and great work?”
With that complimentary opening, managers are now free to share the types of examples I gave above. What you’ll find in these conversations is that the vast majority of middle performers will say something like, “Huh, I didn’t realize that’s all there was to being a high performer.”
It’s shockingly straightforward to transform middle performers into star employees, but it does require that you get started with these specific steps. Just remember that the payoff is easily doubling the number of high performers at your company.
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November 28, 2021 at 09:30PM
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Double The Number Of Star Employees Working At Your Company With This Technique - Forbes
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