How do you get the maximum performance from your team? The cliché goes something like “if you want to get something done give it to a busy person”.  Author Susan Lucia Annunzio confirms this through her research on the performance of work-groups published in “Contagious Success”.  Productivity is vital but insufficient for successful competition.  Annunzio defines “performance” as something more than “productivity”.  When someone is performing they will be doing one or more of the following:

  • Making money for the company.
  • Introducing  new products, services or processes.
  • Opening new markets.

In a global study of knowledge workers, 77% said they were high performing.  However, only 10% of the respondents could provide evidence of high performance.   The distribution in the study was skewed towards non performance, something like this:


90% of the highest paid and best educated employees around the world are not high-performing!

So how does this relate to your business?

Well, if you are managing a team in the average company it is likely that:

  • 10% of your staff are actively looking for ways to make money for your company, to offer new products or to open new markets.
  • 52% of your staff are not be fully engaged in creating success.  How are they spending their day?  What is attracting the creativity for which you are paying?  I worked with an officious little man at one of our local giants in financial services years ago.  Let’s call him Okie.  Okie always had reasons to obstruct the software engineering program we were implementing.  He always seemed very busy but no-one was quite sure what he produced.  Actually there were whole armies of Okie’s there (but before I get started let me return to the topic).   It was only after I had left that I heard he was running a completely separate business from his office.
  • 38% of the people in your teams are not productive at all.  Perhaps they are simply not interested in the work or perhaps they have not been developed or challenged to produce.  What do you expect from these people?

What if you are a marketer, say a broker consultant, working with a panel of brokers selling financial services products?  Do your brokers love you?  Do their faces light up when you walk in?  In your meetings do you generate massive enthusiasm for the business you can do together?  Again it is more likely that:

  • Only 10% of your panel are high producers who love working with you.
  • 52% are just not that invested in your (or their own) success and
  • 38% are filling your day with problems and complaints but are not giving you any income.

So how can we begin to improve these statistics in our businesses?  Where can you start?

In my next posting I will talk about the first of four, high impact steps you can take.