What Do We Do About Solid, Mediocre Performers?
Watch/Listen here or on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts“I believe as the leadership team goes, so goes the rest of the company. So if you don't have that consistent and significant sustainable growth, you've got some work to do.” — Mike Goldman
The Challenge of Mediocre Performers
These employees pose risks to achieving excellence as they can stagnate progress.
Key questions:
Should all employees be high performers?
Is it acceptable to have "solid" performers who meet basic expectations?
The Danger of Accepting Mediocrity
Accepting mediocrity prevents companies from becoming exceptional.
Low performers are easily identified for intervention, but mediocre performers often remain unchallenged, affecting team motivation and overall quality.
Roles Requiring High Performance
Senior Leadership: High performance is essential as their actions ripple through the organization.
Core Differentiating Functions: Roles central to the company's unique value must maintain high standards.
Actions to Improve Performance
Weekly One-on-One Meetings: Essential for coaching and accountability.
Alternating meeting types: Feedback and Accountability (leader-driven) vs. Coaching (employee-driven).
Coaching Medium Performers:
Enhance productivity and culture fit through targeted support.
Explore specific actions tailored to areas where they fall short.
Changing Roles for Better Fit
Shift roles to better leverage strengths if productivity is low but culture fit is high.
Example: Adjusting sales roles to focus on relationship-building instead of closing deals.
Coaching Out When Necessary
When efforts to improve performance fail, consider "coaching out" mediocre performers in critical roles.
For non-core roles, solid performance may be acceptable without high expectations.
Conclusion: Taking Action
Ask two essential questions:
Is the role one where mediocrity is acceptable?
What actions can help elevate or redirect the individual?
Books mentioned:
"Nine Lies About Work" by Marcus Buckingham
"First, Break All the Rules" by Marcus Buckingham
"The Coaching Habit" by Michael Bungay Stanier
"No Rules Rules" by Reed Hastings
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In past episodes, I've talked a lot about actions we should be taking with and for our highest performers. After all, I've said a number of times and I've seen over my 35 plus years in coaching and consulting as leaders, we tend to over invest in our low performers and under invest in our high performers.
So I've talked a lot about actions for high performers. I've also talked about what we. Should be doing with the folks that are low performing. Cause after all, those are folks that are actually hurting our highest performers, hurting us, hurting our teams, our clients, causing stress and frustration for us, as well as for the low performing team member.
But what I haven't talked a lot about is what is, what about all of those folks that are in the middle? What about those solid mediocre performers? What do we do? Do we just leave them alone? Do we work with them? Do they all need to become high performers? Do we fire them all if they're not high performers?
I want to talk about that because for a lot of us, that's most of our folks. So what actions should we be taking with and for them? What decisions do we need to make for those medium performing folks?
And I would actually say that it's those medium performing folks that are the biggest danger. To our ability to create a great company to, to reach our vision.
Now that sounds strange. Wouldn't the low performers be the greatest danger? And the reason why I say they're the greatest danger is for low performers. It's pretty obvious that we need to do something about it. Now, you've seen, I've seen that not every leader, not every company is good at doing something about that.
We know that we need to have the difficult discussion. We need to make the difficult decision and whether we do that slowly, whether we do that quickly,that's something we know, but it's those solid. Performers, those mediocre performers that are easy not to take any action on because they're plotting along every day.
But the problem is you can't have a great company without great people. And if you're willing to accept mediocre performance, you're never going to have a great company. If you're willing to accept mediocre performance, those high performers in time. Will leave and go somewhere that is more challenging for them or drop down and become medium performers because after all, some will say, why do I need to work so hard?
If these mediocre folks are here and they're still getting by, they're still here. So it brings up the question, do we need all high performers?
Am I telling you that mediocre performance is unacceptable? And my answer to that is more nuanced than a yes or a no. I certainly believe there is a place for solid, Performance.
They're not going above and beyond. We wouldn't call them high performing. We wouldn't call them superstars. We wouldn't call them a players. There's absolutely a place for those solid medium performing folks, but I want to get more specific as to what that place is, and I'm going to start with the opposite, where do we need high performers?
and there's a difference by the way, between where we need high performance and where we should strive. For high performance. I believe we should strive coach, develop everyone to become high performers. Why would we be satisfied with solid mediocre performance? Why shouldn't we strive? But it's one thing to strive.
It's another thing to say it's on that solid mediocre performance is unacceptable. So let me unpack that. I believe there are two.
Types of roles within an organization where high performance is a requirement. It's not just something nice to strive for. It's a requirement. The first place where I believe it's a requirement.
Is on your senior leadership team. I believe for the CEO and the CEO's direct reports, we need all high performers, and if they're not high performers, they need a strong potential to be able to get there over the next three to six months. Think about the impact of a mediocre performer on your senior leadership team.
The impact as it goes down and out. Through your organization, out to your clients, out to your vendors.
There's an old saying that I like, and the math doesn't quite work. A players hire A players, B players hire C players. Now, I don't like those labels anymore, A, B, C. And I try not to use them, but it's kind of a quick way of saying that great people hire other great people. The mediocre people are not hiring great people.
They're probably not even hiring mediocre people. They tend to hire people that are lower performing than them and the reason why a mediocre, solid, medium performing leader might hire low performing folks is number one, they may not know high performing when they see it. And even if they do, it may be threatening to them.
Hiring someone that may be better and smarter and more creative than they are is threatening. It's risky. What are they going to do if this person's better and smarter and more productive than they are. Now the words they may use are things like, I think this person is overqualified, but that may be code for man.
They're better than I am. And I don't even know what I would do with them. And then maybe it's a threat to my job. So they tend to hire folks that are not as good as they are. So number one, having mediocre folks on your leadership team is an issue because of who they're hiring, but it also slows down the rest of the leadership team.
I was just in a meeting last week with a client. With superstars around the table and then one leader, not so much. And it kept dragging the conversation down from strategic to tactical, from aggressive to something much less than that.
If you want a great company, you need a great leadership team. We can't have mediocre folks. On the leadership team. So that's one area is on that senior leadership team. The second area where I believe we need to do more than strive for high performance, it needs to be a requirement is in any function that is core to what differentiates you.
As a company. I first read about this in a great book by Reed Hastings, the founder, and CEO, I think he's still CEO of Netflix, wrote a book called no rules rules. And I love this concept of understanding what differentiates you for Netflix. Uh, it's their ability to select the right content. It's their, the technology around their algorithms to make recommendations.
They can't afford to have mediocre folks in those roles. Think about for you, what makes your company great? It may not be your accounts receivable or your accounts payable.
But what makes your company great? Do you pride yourself on your level of service? And that's what differentiates you. Well, if what differentiates you is your level of service, you can't have mediocre folks that are, facing your clients and serving your clients. That's what differentiates you. How could you be accepting mediocre?
If it's your product innovation. That differentiates you. You can't have product development folks that are mediocre. If it's your technology that differentiates you, you can't have programmers and engineers and architects that are mediocre. So there's a big difference between striving for high performance and requiring high performance in those areas, your senior leadership team, and those areas that are core to what differentiates you.
We need to require high performance.
So let's talk about what actions we take to strive for high performance. And by the way, probably makes sense for me to step back and talk about what I mean by performance, because performance and productivity is not the same thing. I believe there are two axes. That makeup performance.
One of absolutely is productivity. But the second one is culture fit. Productivity is measured typically through the use of key performance indicators, those measures of success that tell us whether we're productive or not. And by the way, working long and hard working nights, working weekends does not mean you're productive.
Someone may be working those kinds of hours because they're not productive. Productivity is about hitting. Performance goals. It's about achieving results. Then that second axis of culture fit is, are people adding to your culture or subtracting from your culture? uh, is this person making the team around them better or worse?
Are they living and modeling your non negotiable core values, non negotiable behaviors every day? So that's what performance means. And when I talk about. medium performance. Those are folks that are not low performing. They're not terribly low in productivity. They're not blatantly and repeatedly violating a whole bunch of core values every day.
Those are our low performers. Medium performers are those folks that are a little lower than you'd like them to be. In productivity, there are one or more KPIs, key performance indicators where they're missing. They're also occasionally having trouble with a core value or two.
So what do we do about those folks? Well, there are a number of actions that we can take. And the first action I want to talk about is actually an action that I recommend for All team members. If you have direct reports, this would be for all of your direct reports in order to work through the actions that I'm about to take you through.
And there are really four different actions we could be taking for our medium performance folks.
Before that, the one thing you should be doing with all your direct reports is having effective weekly one on one meetings. I remember hearing. A, an interview with Marcus Buckingham, who wrote a great book called nine lies about work years ago, he wrote a book called, first break all the rules.
that's just an amazing book.and he said, he asked the question, we're asking him how many people. Should be reporting to one person. there's all this debate about flat organizations or more hierarchical organizations. Should people have no more than six people reporting to them?
Can people have 15 people reporting to them? And he said, how many? Of your direct reports. How many people can you have productive, effective weekly one on one meetings with? And if your answer is, I don't have enough time to have productive, effective weekly one on ones with anybody. I have too many other things to do too much else going on.
Then according to Marcus Buckingham, you should have zero people reporting to you. If you said I can do that with six people, I have the time to have productive, effective weekly one on one meetings. Then you can have six people reporting to you. If you said you could do that with 20 people.
Then you could have 20 people reporting to you. One on ones are a requirement for coaching and developing and giving feedback for and holding your team members accountable. Now it's in addition to some kind of weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual rhythm, meeting rhythm, or what I call the planning and communication rhythm that you have with your team.
But there should also, in addition to that, be one on one meetings. Now, I believe there's two different types of one on one meetings, and I like to alternate them, odd and even weeks. One type of one on one meeting is the feedback and accountability meeting. And that's what most leaders think of as a one on one.
A feedback and accountability meeting is exactly what it says. It's where you are giving feedback to one of your direct reports on their Projects and priorities they're working on, on the KPIs they're hitting or missing, on,their behavior, culture fit, core values. You're giving them feedback and you're holding them accountable to those actions they said they committed to taking.
You're holding them accountable to the results that they committed to achieve. That's the feedback and accountability. Getting it done right. That could be about a 30 minute. Meeting the second type of meeting. Remember we're alternating on and even weeks. The second type of meeting is the coaching meeting in the coaching meeting, unlike the feedback and accountability meeting, where as the leader, it's our agenda for the coaching meeting, the agenda belongs to our direct report in a coaching meeting.
They are coming with a topic or a question or a challenge or an opportunity. And we are coaching them through it. And by coaching them, I don't mean giving them advice. I mean, asking questions to surface the right action for them, asking questions to model. The right way to think the best book I've read on that type of coaching is the coaching habit by Michael Bungay Stanier.
So number one, whether we're talking about a high performer, a medium performer, or a low performer, we need that one on weekly one on one meeting. And we need a specific framework that works.
Now let's talk specifically about the medium performer. Well, the folk, the person who is performing at a mediocre level.
Is performing there instead of at a high level because either there's some aspect of productivity that they need to improve upon and, or there's some aspect of culture fit that they need to work on. There's no other reason they'd be performing at a medium level.
So those are the first two actions. Number one. What could you do to help them improve their productivity? If they're a salesperson and they're not closing enough deals, what could you do to help them with the attitude, with the process? What could you do to help them close more deals? So you're going to work with them on productivity.
Number one, if that's where they're low, if that's what's causing them to be a mediocre performer. And then number two type of action is if they're lower than you'd like them to be on culture fit. Work with them on the level of collaboration, they are exhibiting with their team members, with their,with the level of respect and empathy there.
I mean, I don't think of your core values. If you have core values, think about if you don't have core values, think about those characteristics that would make the people around them better and work with them on those specific characteristics. You can't just say, I'm going to work with them on culture fit.
What specific aspect of culture fit? Is it their coachability? Is it the level of empathy and respect they're showing others? Is it about collaboration? Is it about,
I don't know, the effort they're putting in, dotting all the I's and crossing the T's, whatever it is, so number one. Work with them on productivity, whatever aspect of productivity they need help on number two, work with them to help them improve their level of culture fit. Those are the first two.
And there's a third one.
There's a third and a fourth one, but the third one is one that in certain circumstances, Could turn someone from a medium performer to a high performer literally in the snap. That was a finger snapping literally in the snap of a finger. And it doesn't work in all circumstances, but here's where it does work.
Imagine you have someone that is super high performing from a culture fit standpoint, but they're just not cutting it from a productivity standpoint. Imagine you have that salesperson who. Is living the culture at a high level. Again, I'll use the example of they're not closing enough deals. They are really, really powerful and productive at opening up new relationships in maintaining relationships, but they just don't have that killer instinct to close the deal.
Well, what if? You could change their role to better leverage their strengths. What if you could make that weakness around closing deals disappear and only focus on their ability to initiate new relationships, build and maintain and strengthen those relationships? What if there was an account manager position?
That was all about relationships and not about closing new deals. What if there was a business development function that was about them building new relationships with strategic Alliance partners? But again, it wasn't about closing the deal. Those opportunities may not be there. You're not going to make up a role just to turn someone into a high performer, but if those roles exist, or if you could build those roles and it would be Important, super helpful for your organization.
Then if you change their role to leverage their strengths, they will go from medium performing to high performing overnight. So to summarize so far, everybody should get the one on one meeting framework, but then the three actions we talked about so far to help coach this mediocre performer up to high performing.
Is help them improve productivity and or help them improve culture fit. That's number two. Number three is change their role. Those are all, those are three ways to move someone from mediocre performing to high performing.
Then we've got option number four.
If we can't coach them up, if we've tried to coach them up, if they are on the senior leadership team. If they are playing a role in a core function that differentiates us where mediocre performance is not acceptable, where high performance is a requirement after we tried to coach them up, if that's not working, we need to coach them out.
and here is the danger of that. mediocre performer is if they're on the senior leadership team, if they are in a core function that differentiates us, we tend to just leave them be. Because we're not used to coaching medium performers out of our organization. We only do that for the low performers.
It's a crazy tough decision to do that for a medium performing individual. If we want a great company, we need a great team. And mediocre performance on the senior leadership team in a core function that differentiates us is not going to get us to great. Now, if they are not on the senior leadership team, if they are not in a core function that differentiates them.
It's acceptable. It's okay to have a solid, mediocre performer in a role like that. We're still going to strive as we always should. We should still strive to help them improve their performance. But are we going to coach them out of the organization? Are we going to fire them? Are we going to fire that accounts payable clerk if she doesn't go above and beyond as an accounts payable clerk?
I don't think so. I think it's perfectly okay to have someone in a non core role who's just doing a good solid job. But again, it's not okay. And I know I'm being redundant here, but it is not okay in a senior leadership team role or in a role that's core that differentiates us.
So I want you to think about those good, solid, mediocre performers, good and not great. And ask yourself two questions. Number one, what kind of role are they in and do I need them to be great or is mediocre okay? And then number two, what actions will I take? The one on one meeting framework, help them with productivity and or help them with culture fit.
Ask the question, whether a change in role will make sense and then depending on whether they are in a role that needs to be great or a role where mediocre is okay Do we need to think about coaching them out if they can't get there? And by the way While coaching them out sounds like a heartless thing to do I don't believe it is because I believe everybody has the ability to be a superstar
And if they don't have the ability to be a superstar in the role they're playing in your company or in your company, period, sometimes we need to set them free to become a superstar somewhere else. So ask yourself those two questions, take action, and I look forward to seeing you next time.