Performance Appraisal Season

With the end of fiscal year, and the season of Performance review cycles around - I got into an interesting discussion with one of a colleague. When middle Management is growing from a direct people manager to a portfolio leader, why all of a sudden things become complex and people easily lose the perspective. One important reason is the Leaders start losing touch with their own people.

Let's look at it this way. On most teams there are three types of employees:

1. Superstars: People who have the experience, knowledge and desire to be very best at their jobs.

2. Middle Stars: They may not have the experience to be a superstar yet or maybe they are former superstars who for some reason lost their motivation to be the best.

3. Falling Stars: One's who are doing as little as they can get away with.

A typical team has about 30% superstars, 50% middle stars and 20% falling stars. If you keep piling more work on superstars, then you shouldn't expect them to continue to be superstars, oh sure there would be some superstars who remain superstars, irrespective of the situation\workload, but others will be beaten down to middle stars because of the additional work you pile on.

So where is the minimum acceptable level of performance represented? Most of you would say - middle stars, that is straight. This is where we go wrong. The minimum acceptable performance is actually at 20%, the falling stars. The people at bottom are there in the team and so their behavior is acceptable. In fact many Managers reward their falling stars by giving them less work while acknowledging them with decent performance reviews!! When you do that, you should expect more people to fall into that category.

As a Manager your job is not to lower the bottom by adjusting and accommodating the low performance cases, but to raise the top by recognizing and rewarding superstar behaviors. With ignoring performance issues you cannot expect your superstars to stay long with you…..

Happy Friday and have a great weekend ahead, I look forward to hear your views in comments.

#team#people#highperformanceculture#hipo#culture#Leaders#leadership#mindset#leadershipmindset