“Yes,” Roger nodded. “Grading my sales team into these six bands of effectiveness helps me see what to do next.”
“How so?” I prompted.
“The temptation is to keep all the people in the top half of the banding and terminate the people in the bottom half. But now I have more judgments to make, as a manager.”
“There’s more?” I pressed.
“Yes. I have one sales person, in the top of the top half, that needs leadership training. In another year, I want to move that salesperson into a more complicated product line, with a longer sales cycle.”
“And?”
“And,” Roger stopped. “And I need to terminate five out of the seventeen people I have on my team.”
“How did you reach that conclusion?” I asked.
“Again, it wasn’t difficult. I have been making excuses for their poor performance, sent them to training, tried to motivate them, offered a bonus. Once I did the analysis, it became very clear.”
Tom.
This is a scary and true post.
When you write “sent them to training, tried to motivate them, offered a bonus” I felt a pain in my stomach.
This is very common and often seen as the last resort, send them to training and more training – now the responsibility is on the trainer or coach to “fix the person”.
Although exploring the banding process where we see that some people are high, middle and low in the spectrum of capabilities, skills, values and commitment – more training and ignoring poor performance does not work.
My question is what about the manager? Does he not bear any responsibility? He “ignored poor performance” what is his accountability?
Tom, a short story:
Some years ago I did a ranking with a 7 people management team. They ranked 35 of their direct employees. The outcome was: “Let us fire the last 5 persons in the ranking.”
“Before you do that, please read the performance appraisals for the last 2 years of this five people”, I proposed.
What do you think, did we read in the performance appraisals of this 5 people?
Tom, what is the weaker performance? Rating weak performance or not telling people about their weak performance?