Kishore (October 2003)

Performance Management is constant challenge for supervisors and team managers. One of the challenges is how to handle low performance or average achievers. Some believe that getting rid of low performers is one way to show that we don't tolerate low performance. It makes business sense to get rid of people so that you can get better results with high performance people. However, Peter Drucker in book "The Effective Executive" states that it is fact of life that we have high performers and low performers. Executives need to take up this challenge and make best out of the situation. 

I agree with Peter Drucker's view. A leader is effective only when he can performers out of non-performers. In all schools teachers have the same challenge. Every year and every class they get a variety of kids. Some are good and some are not so good. The challenge for the teachers to make sustain good performance in the achievements and make low performers improve. If all teachers threw the low performers out of school, we will have lot of more illiterate people in the world. 

Lessons learned from personal experience

Recently I had an experience in my personal life that taught me a lesson. 

My daughter has been riding bike with training wheels. We realized that it is time we made her ride without training wheels. We were comparing her with other kids in her age group and were bent upon making her bike without training wheels. Every day I started taking her out on the bike. Despite a few days of training, she was still not confident of riding on her own. She was scared. We were not sure why she is taking so long to learn such a simple thing. 

One day it dawned on me. I realized that she was unable to reach ground on the bike and that is making her loose balance easily. We had another smaller bike. Then I quickly switched the bike. I gave her a smaller bike without training wheels. She was able to maintain balance much easily and within 2 days she was on her own, riding confidently all around. She made quick progress and is completely in control. 

I realized that our expectations were too high and we have set higher goals than she was capable of. By lowering our expectations and ensuring that she had right setup to meet the goals, we were able to make things happen

Implications in business

We tend to do similar mistakes in business. We compare people and expect low performers to measure up with high performers. We increase our expectations on our team members and we fail to communicate them. We start comparing them constantly and start setting higher goals than they are capable of. In such cases they are bound to fail and that confirms our expectations and we start concluding that low performers will never improve. 

To improve this

• Analyze everyone's strengths, weaknesses. 

• Match goals with strengths

• Identify ways to eliminate weaknesses

• Communicate opportunities

• Communicate how they can achieve new goals

• Set Clear objectives

• Monitor progress

• Encourage when they make progress and caution when they are deviating from goals

• Do it regularly and not just once in a while. 

Just like the teacher who gives a low performing child all the opportunities to improve, strive to improve performance of low performers in your team with patience. 

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