Thoughts from The 100: Identifying Saints, Dogs, and Stars

 

The-100-Title-OnlyTo keep morale and motivation high, it’s essential to motivate your top performers as well those who need to improve and those who need to be shown the door. There’s a shorthand code for these three groups of employees:

Saints: those who may be a great fit with our culture but who are poor performers.

  • Dogs: those who score high on the performance scale but who are a poor cultural fit
  • Stars: those rare but wonderful individuals who are both high performers and a good fit with our cultural values. These folks are given extra incentives to remain long-term members of our organization.

Our response to saints and dogs is the same: shape up or ship out. While this may sound harsh, keeping employees who don’t perform or fit with your company values risks bringing down the whole ship.

As I note in my new book, “The 100: Building Blocks for Business Leadership,” most employees are not fired because they lack necessary technical skills. Most often they have poor emotional intelligence. In other words, their personality or people skills are a poor fit with our cultural expectations. Firing someone with top technical skills who alienates clients or teammates through arrogance or bullying is a no-brainer. Those folks, along with those kind souls who can’t seem to get anything done, are not organizational assets.

Once you’ve made a decision to let someone go, do so quickly and use the following guidelines to make the process as painless as possible (for you and them!):

  • Have two people from your firm present
  • Bring a legal separation (especially if severance pay is involved) agreement
  • Quickly pay the fired employee for all hours worked and for unreimbursed expenses and any unused vacation time
  • Be mentally prepared for the employee to promise he or she will change
  • Do not let the employee change your decision
standardAugust 30Tom SalonekHappy Employees

Thoughts from The 100: Using Key Result Areas to Drive Performance

The-100-Title-OnlyLast time I shared thoughts about how to keep employees motivated. (My thoughts on this important topic also are described in my new book, “The 100: Building Blocks for Business Leadership.”) Providing clear feedback is another important aspect for achieving motivational magic. It’s also important to set expectations from day one and to give frequent informal feedback in between formal reviews.

A good talent management system looks forward, provides clear and objective performance standards and encourages team members to state when he or she needs training or different tools to reach goals. At Intertech, we use Dale Carnegie’s Key Results Areas (KRAs) as a template for talent management. Four key questions guide us:

  • What is the purpose of my job? The answer should be extremely simple, such as “selling our services.”
  • What do I need to do to make it happen? For someone in sales, the answer might be “Call 100 potential clients every day.”
  • What tools do I need to be successful? For a sales person, training in phone skills or negotiation techniques might be in order.
  • How do I know when results have been achieved? As in the sales example above, reaching a specific dollar amount would be an objective measure of goal achievement.

Like any journey, arriving at your desired destination is much easier with a clear map to guide you. Think of KRAs as employee guideposts to make the journey more productive and satisfying for them and you.

standardAugust 9Tom SalonekLeadership

Today’s the Day! Intertech Learning Summit and 25th Anniversary

2016LearningSummit5Today’s the day!  Join us for great presentations and a hosted reception from 3:00 – 6:00 at Intertech:

  • 3:00 — Leveraging IoT to Improve Your Products and Services (Jim Karg, Sr. Intertech Consultant)
  • 4:00 — Using Agile and Scrum across the Organization (Lonnie Weaver-Johnson, Agile Instructor)
  • 5:00 — Delivering High Performance using Employee Engagement (me)

Also, in celebrating our 25th anniversary, we’ll have a drawing for $5,000 of training and other fine free stuff.

It’s an open house… show up if it works whenever it works!

standardAugust 3Tom SalonekArticle on Intertech