Performance Management 101.

Conceptual:

What You Need To Understand

With these basic concepts defined, lets now turn our attention to connecting them in an actual framework.

Assessing someone's level of Attitude and Ability helps you determine what type of Follower they are, informing you of the type of Support and/or Direction they require:

Low Attitude and Low Ability = Internship. This type of person will require a lot of Support and a lot of Direction.

Low Attitude plus High Ability = Stewardship. This person has the skills to be successful, but they may require ongoing motivation to steer their efforts in the right direction.

High Attitude plus Low Ability = Apprenticeship. This person is keen, eager and unafraid to try. They will however need to be taught how to do what needs to be done.

High Attitude plus High Ability = Ownership. This person owns their function. They will execute with minimal Direction and require very little Support as they do it. If anything, meeting this person’s needs requires staying out of their way.

While Ability and Alignment will tell you the needs of your followers, Alignment will tell you whose needs you should be prioritizing.

Low Culture and Low Competence  =  someone who is fundamentally misaligned. If someone is poor at their job, and they are working against the team, they should be Turned Over.

Low Culture plus High Competence = someone who has the proven skills to do the job, however the manner in which they apply these skills often works against other members of the team. This is someone the team is merely Tolerating.

High Culture plus Low Competence = a future star in the making. They are with you for the right reasons, and tend to make those around them better. They just need opportunities to practice their Abilities in order for those Abilities to become proven Competence. You must Train these people.

High Culture plus High Competence = someone you can Trust completely. You not only know they will get the job done, you know they will keep the best interests of the team in mind as they do so.

Procedural:

What You Need To Do

With these two frameworks in place, here's how to combine them to know exactly where you should be spending your time as a leader.

Combine the two grids and you have an instant dashboard on where you should be spending your time.

Alignment becomes the 'macro-heirarchy'. You must begin by determining who you can Trust, who you must Train, who you must Tolerate and who you must Turnover.

You can safely eliminate those in the Turnover quadrant. Almost all time spent with someone in this quadrant should be avoided.

The order of operations should be Trust - followed by Train - followed by Tolerate. Many leaders spend most of their time with those they should merely be Tolerating as these are the people on their team that suck up the most bandwidth. All this does is steal time from your 'A Players'; those you can Trust to do more and more as time goes on.

Leaders continually neglect those in the upper right hand quadrant because they give in to the false assumption that they are rockstars that don't need support.

When you combine the frameworks you can see how you may have an 'A Player' who is also an Intern.

Perhaps you just promoted a top employee into their first leadership role. They've always delivered (Competence) and they are aligned with your values (Culture) however they are nervous about being a leader (Attitude) and need to learn the fundamentals of building a team (Ability). They need increased Support and Direction from you, however you Trust them completely even though they have yet to prove themselves in this new role.

How many of those Trusted individuals can you afford to lose? 

You need to ask yourself this because the real crime is when this person gets neglected because you are spending time with someone in the Tolerate zone.

You may have an Owner, who has both the Ability and the Attitude to do their job. However, because they are misaligned with your Culture, there is a 'pain-in-the-ass-tax' that comes along with them. Their high levels of ability and motivation become weaponized when they start using them as reasons to needlessly critique others, complain about policy, argue against the teams goals, etc. They are convinced that their high level of performance entitles them to say and do things that end up having a negative impact on your Culture.

These are the people that suck a leaders time, both listening to their rants, and being forced to clean up after them.  Leaders willingly allow this to happen time and again because the person is 'good at their job', and 'good people are hard to find.'  The cost of that however, is often seeing Low-Ability / Low-Attitude rockstars walk out the door because their needs aren't being met.

Going even deeper

This week's tip has obviously gone deeper than most. Believe it or not, there's even more to this, and here is just a small sample:

• You need to know how to properly set goals to assess Ability.
• You need to know how to read someone's emotional state in order to assess their Attitude.
• You need to know the role your Values play in determining Alignment and how to tell if you have a 'C Player' or simply an 'A Player' who is having a bad day.

The good news is, we can show you how to do all of these things using the tools we have already put in many of your hands. 

Book a Coaching Call and we will help you take all of this from theory to practice.

Have a challenge?

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