As I visit around the country, I constantly see the detrimental impact of low performers on organizations. Recently I surveyed a group of managers and found that they estimated that they spent four times more time on the low performers in their departments than on other employees.
Take a second and soak in the impact of that statistic. Managers are spending four times the effort on a group that comprises about 8 percent of their workforce. Is there little wonder that executive search firms find so many high performers willing to change jobs?
We aren’t spending enough time retaining our high and middle performers. We keep hoping that troublesome low performers will move on to some other department or company, but it’s the valued high and middle performers that get frustrated and start looking for greener pastures.
According to HealthLeader magazine, 49 percent of the high performers in healthcare are looking for a different job, while only 16 percent of the low performers are looking, which indicates we have a retention issue and it is for the wrong person, the low performer. What we permit, we promote.
The high performers lose faith in the organization’s ability to create and sustain long-term gains. They get tired of working around the low performers and see leaving as the only option when senior leadership fails to address the problem.
The middle performers are pulled down by the low performers. They see all the attention the low performers get from senior leaders and start to emulate less desirable behaviors or feel their current performance does not need to get better.
The low performers have no intention of leaving as long as they get their way. They have a whole set of strategies developed over the years to make their jobs secure. Every new program or management initiative is simply a waiting game, and the low performers are confident that can outlast any new program. Their motto is “This, too, will pass.”
We have to address low performers if we to retain our high performers and improve our middle performers. This is why I wrote about high, middle and low performers in the first chapter of Results That Last (“Up or Out”). The chapter offers you management tactics that help you shift your efforts so that you’ll spend 92% of your time with the high and middle performers. They’ll feel re-engaged, the entire organization’s performance curve, and everyone will enjoy great results . . . results that last.
