Pulling the Plug on Low Performers
Techniques for moving your low performers up - or more likely, out - before they can wreak more havoc.
Carol consistently comes to work late. She is often absent with headaches that seem to conveniently occur on (non-payday) Fridays. When she is at work, she flits from office to office, cheerily chatting with coworkers and visiting the break room for coffee. It takes her so long to do tasks that, eventually, others must pick up her slack. Not surprisingly, Carol’s coworkers have become resentful about carrying her and several have left for greener pastures. As her manager, you dearly wish she would join them. But it’s obvious she’ll never leave voluntarily: she’s been with the company longer than anyone else.
Carol is the quintessential low performer. If you have a Carol working for you, make no mistake: she will keep you from becoming a high-performance organization. Her goal is to simply coast along, collecting a paycheck and doing as little as possible. Not only will she resist change at every turn, her attitude will infect everyone else around her. Your only choice is to move her up or out.
You already know low performers don’t contribute much, but what you may not realize is how much real damage they do to your organization. When it comes to change initiatives, they spread fear and misinformation and make every attempt to pull middle performers down to their level. High performers simply refuse to work with them. They will either leave the company or disengage from their jobs. Worse, these dynamics impact your customers - low performers ignore them and everyone else is too busy picking up the slack to serve them properly - and squelch profitability and service goals.
It’s ironic, but low performers have amazing power. Managers unwittingly align entire departments, entire companies, around them. You dread working with them so you give everything to your high performers, which overloads them and creates an unfair distribution of work. Or you keep devoting attention to them believing they’ll change, perhaps putting them on committees to try to engage them.
It rarely works. Meanwhile, you alienate your good people and, eventually, find yourself in a situation where you can’t keep high performers.
So what should you do with low performers? Well, if you’re hoping the problem will go away on its own, perhaps you’d also like to buy a bridge in Brooklyn. Low performers are great at convincing management that they are not the problem. I compare low performers to the proverbial cockroaches that survive nuclear holocaust; they resist any and all change initiatives and outlast leader after leader.
What can you do? Here are a few techniques:
• Resolve to take direct, decisive action now. When you indirectly address the problem - say, by sending low performers to seminars or by rearranging the company to try to find a place for them - you are serving as a rehab institute for wayward employees. Don’t. Your goal is to be profitable. Take steps to bring low performers around but donít waste too much of your valuable time on them.
• Schedule a D.E.S.K. meeting with the low performer. Confront him or her and schedule a meeting right away. Make it the same day, if possible. Do not make chitchat or attempt to start the meeting out on a positive approach. Be very specific in telling the person what he or she is doing wrong and what you expect to be done differently. I recommend the DESK approach:
Describe what has been observed. “Carol, you are consistently coming in late, taking too many sick days and missing deadlines on the projects assigned to you. Other employees have to take over to make sure things get done on time. This is unfair and is causing morale problems among your coworkers.”
Evaluate how you feel. “I am disappointed in your performance. We have discussed this problem, most recently two weeks ago, and you assured me you would take steps to work more efficiently. Your lack of accountability indicates that you don’t care about this company. Everyone else works hard and it upsets me that you don’t.”
Show what needs to be done. “Carol, I am assigning you to the Montgomery account. Your part is due in one week. Over the next five days, I am going to work directly with you and show you how to budget your time and create a final product that will please the client. I expect you to be here by 8 a.m. everyday and to stay on task. I will meet with you in a week to discuss your progress.”
Know consequences of continued low performance. “You have worked here for eight years, and for eight years I’ve let these problems go. But this is a new day and the rules have changed. We are going to have a different work environment with different standards. Right now this is a verbal warning, but if you miss a deadline again it will be a written warning. And if it happens after that, you will be terminated.”
• Set short evaluation periods. In the example above, our hypothetical manager gave his low performer a week to demonstrate an improvement, followed by an open-ended three-strikes-and-you’re-out termination policy. You may think this is too harsh. Perhaps, for your situation, it is. That’s where your judgment as a manager comes into play. Ask yourself, ‘How quickly do I need low performers to fall in line in order to hit my operational goals?’ However much time that takes is how much time you should give them. It comes back to the issue of outcomes vs. personal development. Outcomes are what matters; development is only a means to that end. It’s certainly valid to decide that, if a person is showing slow improvement, you simply can’t wait that long. Just be sure he or she knows exactly what your expectations are.
• Be relentless in your follow up. If you see it, say it - both good and bad. If you see a marked improvement in the low performer’s behavior, acknowledge it. A sincere effort deserves a sincere compliment. However, the next time your Carol rolls into the parking lot at 8:45, takes a two-hour lunch, or comes up short at deadline time, be quick to submit the promised written warning. And if it happens again, fire her. I believe strongly in the adage, select slow, deselect fast.
• Learn the art of just do it firing. It’s never easy to fire someone. If it were, low performers wouldn’t be an issue and you wouldn’t be reading this article. When you decide to do it, just do it. Have your documentation in hand and, as with previous tips, be decisive and straightforward. You can simply say, “I followed our policies, and at this time your employment is being terminated.”
When you apply the above tips to your own low performer, you may balk. That’s understandable. Not only is firing someone unpleasant - particularly when that someone has been with your company for a long time - it creates a vacuum in your organization. And isn’t even a low performer better than nothing?
Clients are always saying to me, “But isn’t 25 percent better than zero?” In other words, isn’t a very low performing employee preferable than no employee at all? And my answer is absolutely not. By hanging on to a low performer, not only are you impacting all your other employees in a negative way, you’re also holding a spot that, potentially, a high performer could fill.
Look at it this way. Subtraction is really addition. For other employees who had to deal with this person, it’s like they had a foot pressing down on their chest. When you fire him or her, the foot is pulled away. Chances are, your other employees will be thrilled and you’ll find that you can attract a better person. And from there, great things will start to happen. So yes, you have to make that leap of faith - but it’s a leap that almost always takes you closer to becoming a high-performance organization.