In just about any work group or organization, you’ll find a normal distribution of performance quality. In other words, your employees will fall into the normal bell curve with a few superstars, a handful of laggards, with most of your employee population falling in the middle.
The management books and the HR folks will tell you reach out to all employees to create a high performing environment. The fundamental flaw with this advice comes from its source: most of the authors of management books have never actually been managers; and, HR… well, it’s HR. If you’re one of the few companies out there with a high performing HR department, then you probably should heed their advice. For all the other organizations, tell HR that once it manages itself to be a high performing group, they will win the privilege of advising you to do likewise.
Here’s what you actually need to do: forget about the front and back of your bell curve. Yep, that’s right, ignore your superstars and your laggards.
Your superstars are often your most high-maintenance people. They often do great work, but leave a trail of broken relationships behind them. When you look at their overall impact on the organization, as opposed to their proficiency in what you’ve asked them to do, the net effect is often much less positive than you might be lead to believe. They also tend to jump ship quicker than others.
Your laggards are a bit more tricky. You can’t ignore critically poor performance, or it will drag others’ performance down. You need to minimize the influence your laggards have on others, but you don’t want to put a whole bunch of energy into trying to improve the poor performer if there’s little chance it will substantially improve.
Leaders need to focus on the middle of their curve. If you can push those good performers a bit further along the curve, then the overall impact to the organization can be substantial. Those in the middle are lower maintenance, they probably have a higher ability to improve than the laggards, and they are more stable than the superstars.
The success of an organization rarely depends on the retention of a few superstars. More likely it depends on the retention of the middle majority of good performers – the same group that likely gets the least attention in most organizations.
I guess irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.