OK so now you have identified how your team is performing and you are working with your top performers to find out what they need to boost their output. You are creating a space in which they can soar.
How else can you grow performance?
Cutting the poor performers may save costs but it will not create income. Organisation transformation is expensive, distracting and de-motivating for staff, takes time and carries a high risk of failure.
Fortunately there is another way.
There is massive potential for improvement in the middle group. To accelerate performance, help your average performers reach the next level. The next step is to engage the people who show up everyday but leave their hearts and minds somewhere else. They fill their day with countless other considerations like running other businesses on your time or spending the time at the water-cooler. By energising a small percentage of this middle group, you can double your number of top performers. You will aim for an effect like this:
- Start by identifying the top 20% of the average performers.
- Create teams in which the more promising of the average achievers work together with the top-performers. Promising members in the middle group may most easily be influenced by joining the high performing teams. Consider executive sponsorship and challenging projects for these teams.
- Initiate the conversation in which the high performers share their secrets. This conversation takes time. Commit yourselves to making this time available. You can also find creative and practical vehicles for conversation. An organisation I work with use workshops to initiate and plan projects. These workshops get the projects clearly focussed but they have also created a platform for conversation and relationship building that goes way beyond the projects themselves.
- Deal with the resistance to the initiative by bringing the issues into the light and allowing team members to discuss how to deal with them.
It would also be worth considering the input of J Richard Hackman.
Now what about your broker panel? How can we apply this to them? Consider your middle performers in two groups:
- There are brokers who, with some input from you, will boost their performance up into the top performing group. Budget significant time with them.
- There are others who sit comfortably, without delivering value to you. They are not interested in growing their industry and product knowledge. They are not hungry for new clients and new business. People in this group can sometimes deliver enough to keep them in your business. However it may be a good idea to run a cost benefit analysis on this group to help you plan the time and energy you spend on them.
Remember, your intention is to create enough time and space to develop the heavy hitters in your team as well as the promising up and coming talent.
