The reality is that there are big differences in individual performance. Statements like “she does the work of three people” or “he’s worth his weight in gold” are often more truth than myth. The best managers recognize this and go to great lengths to identify and promote top performers and develop or eliminate underperformers. People’s decisions—who to hire, who to fire, who to promote, who to spend time with—make or break most leaders.
To assist in this process, a Performance Matrix can be applied periodically (semi-annually or annually) as the basis for recruiting, performance appraisal, and talent reviews.
Most performance appraisal rituals consist of annual numerical rating systems that provide little insight into how to actually classify and differentiate employee contributions. However, effective leaders and managers intuitively know that seemingly comparable employees, with comparable pay scales, often make vastly different levels of contribution. It is not uncommon to hear phrases like “that person is worth at least twice that other person.” Why is this? And how can we develop performance appraisal systems that encourage and recognize these dramatic differences in individual contribution?
First, we must recognize that a clear distinction must be made between the contributions of self-centered people and those of people who are more focused on the well-being of the organization as a whole. While everyone acts at some level out of self-interest, some people act primarily out of self-interest and can’t really contribute to any discussion of the well-being of the entire organization without reference (explicitly or implicitly) to their own needs. This is what we mean by self-centered people.
Self-centered people are pretty easy to spot. They are the ones who will distort the dialogue, no matter the topic, in any way necessary to be able to tell you what they think or talk about their background. They love to tell you what they know and, frankly, aren’t very willing to listen to what you might know. They often start with the assumption that they have the answer. They overgeneralize from their own experience to grand theories of the universe. Especially if they are in high-level positions, they expect administrative staff to bow to their every whim. Finally, they are much more likely to be men than women.
Self-centered people believe that the world revolves around them and that’s the way it should. Their need to consider their own personal agenda when solving any organizational problem is often much more apparent to those they interact with than they realize.
The significance of all of this for our purposes here is that it turns out that self-centered people make lousy leaders and managers. There are many reasons for this:
Self-centered people tend to blame others for failures, rather than accept responsibility, and this, of course, makes it impossible to establish a constructive learning organization.
They find it impossible to have a genuine dialogue on any organizational issue without explicitly or implicitly inserting their own personal agenda.
Great leaders learn to love the people they work with, both their peers and those who work for them. Self-centered people love themselves first and everyone else a distant second, if at all. Potential followers sense this, and emotionally pull as far away from self-centered leaders as possible. Simply put, people know whether or not their boss cares about them, and there’s no way the boss is going to fake that. No matter who thinks he should lead, no one will really follow a self-centered boss over the hill.
The actions of self-centered leaders are primarily driven by increasing their organizational power base or personal financial returns, rather than improving the market power and effectiveness of the organization as a whole.
This brings us to the second dimension on which individual contributions can be evaluated: the level of production and results that the individual can deliver, either directly or through managing their work group. It is a fact of organizational life that individuals vary greatly on this dimension. Based on your values, attitude, talent, life circumstances, knowledge and experience, we could think of three levels of performance:
high performance artists. These are people who can be counted on to consistently perform a large amount of work per unit of time. High performers are often internally driven, as evidenced by personal stories in which they have achieved high performance over a period of years regardless of the organizational context.
Solid Performers. These are people who can be counted on to deliver results that exceed acceptable organizational standards.
weak performers. These are individuals whose individual contributions do not measure up to the organization’s standards. Often these people can “talk a good game” but, when it comes time to deliver, the results are nowhere to be found.
By bringing together these dimensions of performance, a performance matrix can be used to classify and differentiate the various levels of individual contribution to organizations:
Headaches are weak performers who are also self-centered. These are the people who not only complain, but add marginal or negative value to the organization. Turning headache individuals into valuable organizational artists is a low-probability proposition. The solution for these people is simple to conceive, though not always so simple to implement: They need to leave the organization, either voluntarily or involuntarily.
Heartbreaks are also weak performers, but have the best interests of the organization in mind. The challenge with headaches is providing them with the skills training, performance goals, and mentoring support to enable them to improve their performance. Distressed people who can become valued professionals are some of the most loyal employees an organization has. On the other hand, angsts who are unwilling to acknowledge performance gaps or unable to improve their performance should go. These are some of the most difficult actions for a conscientious manager to take, because he knows that the employee really wanted to succeed. The best organizations do everything they can to give heartaches every chance to succeed, before concluding that they can’t.
Cowboys and cowgirls are employees who think primarily of themselves, but can still deliver results. In high-tech companies, the classic example of this is the renegade programmer who produces working software, but refuses to follow any kind of structured process for doing so. Salespeople who send the message “don’t tell me how to sell, don’t ask me to follow a process, let me sell” are another example. The underlying assumption of Cowboys and Cowgirls is that “results are all that matter.” The problem with tolerating these people is that their interpretation of the results is too limited, if the organization only focuses on that achieves the goal achieved does not pay attention to as achieved, then nothing has been learned to ensure that the results can be repeated (or improved upon) in the future.
Professionals are people who show up to work every day, work hard, care about the best interests of the organization, and deliver results. They are the “backbone” of the organization. Retaining professionals and identifying and mentoring those who can become Business Builders is truly a make-or-break proposition for many organizations in today’s knowledge-rich, talent-poor economy. In the knowledge-based organization, many of the company’s real assets are in the brains of these professionals. Only when those brains are actively engaged does the organization have a chance to succeed.
Rock stars in organizations generally behave like rock stars on VH1. They love being on stage, showing everyone how much they know. They crave attention and tend to dominate (and often ruin) meetings where the organization is really trying to get something done. They are very bad at sharing ownership of a task (how many rock stars really like to share the stage?). They have fun showing off how smart they are, and will go out of their way to orchestrate situations to get a chance to do so. Sometimes they’re not so subtle about it; One of us once had a classmate who was a classic rock star get up from his chair at a board meeting, grab the presentation pointer out of our hand in the middle of a sentence, and begin to wrap up the presentation.
The most annoying thing about rock stars is that, in a knowledge-based company, you need some of them. They simply bring too much talent for high-performance individual contribution, and often too much experience to dispose of. However, you need them on the correct paper. Here is a guideline that is very important and very simple: rock stars should not have any working for them. As we’ve seen, all self-centered people make lousy leaders and managers, and rock stars are some of the worst, because really believe they are good at almost everything. (The best managers start out with the belief that they have something to learn from their direct reports—this is heresy for a rock star.) We have seen this guideline violated many times, with enormously destructive consequences for the organization, probably because rock stars have charismatic personalities that on the surface suggest that they ought be good leaders. Instead, rock stars belong in staff roles or individual contributor roles within a line organization, where a strong leader above them can maximize their contribution and minimize their damage.
The most important professional development is that which turns Professionals into Business Builders. The other major development focus is turning Heartaches, Cowboys, and Cowgirls pros. On rare occasions, rock stars can also become business builders, but this usually doesn’t happen because the rock star gets too much ego gratification from his stage performance. (They are too busy attending to these ego needs to spend much time with others.)
Operationalization of the Performance Matrix
Use The Performance Matrix in your recruiting process. The best employee development system is to get the right people on the bus in the first place.
Use The Performance Matrix in your talent review process and performance appraisal system. Categorize each employee in the performance matrix. Set specific goals for what percentage of your employees should be professionals, business builders, and rock stars.
Use The Performance Matrix in your employee development system. Give your cowboy employees every opportunity to become professionals by communicating the visions, strategies, goals, and programs that represent the vision centered on the organization. Give your Heartache employees every opportunity to become professionals by defining outcomes, leveraging their strengths, and helping them find the right fit.
Don’t tolerate the self-centered behavior of cowboys and cowgirls, even though they may be generating narrowly defined short-term results. It won’t pay off in the long run, and the short-term consequences of self-centered actions are more serious than you might think.
Don’t let Rock Stars direct or direct anyone. Ever.
