Knowing your team members in depth is critical when coming to performance analysis and management.
Leaders in many organizations happen to find throttling the performance of their subordinates to be the biggest challenge and, given the complexity, this leads managers often to making serious mistakes by misdiagnosing the problem and, consequently, not solving it.
It is more or less like defining the root causes of something: if you cure the symptom you solve the immediate problem (maybe) but not the wider one that originated everything.
An easy way to improve diagnosis and better solutions is to focus on the employee’s attitude, motivation and knowledge of the job.
In a nutshell it is necessary to ask two simple questions:
- Does the employee know how to do the job?
- Does the employee want to do the job well?
If the answer is “no” to either of the two, you fall back into the situation where performance does not meet expectations. It is therefore important to understand how to act.
We can identify four cases:
- The willing and prepared employee failing to deliver: has the knowledge and the desire. If an employee has both a positive attitude and has demonstrated the skills to achieve job expectations, his/her inability to perform is due to something beyond their control. Maximum performance doesn’t come without adequate resources, including time. The trigger could also be a factor in an organizational culture that inhibits the performance of the best individuals remember: organizational culture has the power to outperform the performance of mid-range individuals and destroy the performance of the best. One of the major failures of management is to blame an employee in this situation, which does not solve the problem and often leads to the loss of a good resource. Top performers don’t stay with companies that consistently offer unrealistic expectations, always limited resources, and an ineffective culture.
- The expert without enthusiasm: the employee has the knowledge, but the desire is lacking. If it is clear that the employee knows how to do the job, but it is the attitude that is lacking, you can clearly spot a “motivational” problem. Telling a resource that does not have the adequate resources to do a job to “perform better” will not work – and probably will not work for an employee with a “motivation” problem. What is needed is to adapt the reward system (i.e. the lack of recognition, praise or feedback) and act promptly.
- A willingful starter: the employee does NOT have the knowledge, but he has the attitude. If an employee has a positive attitude towards the job, but does not have the knowledge, represents a managerial / organizational failure – unless for some reason it has been hired an employee knowing that is and will not know how to do the parts or all of the job. The solution is a long shot one because involves crating the skills which is something a company can sometimes not be able to afford.
- The lazy “ignorant”: The employee has nor the desire nor the knowledge. In this case often the problem is identified in the employee. Can be the case but not always: it can be a symptom of an organizational / managerial problem that must at least be considered and, if real, corrected.