A Q&A with Leadership IQ CEO Mark Murphy
Q: How can managers maximize their middle performers?
MM: First I want to dispel one giant misunderstanding about what maximizing middle performers really means. Because too often when I talk on this topic, managers push back and say, “I don’t want to mess with my middle performers. If we have too many superstars the organization won’t be able to handle it.”
Here’s the thing, performance has two dimensions: skills and attitude. A high performer is somebody who has great skills and great attitude. High Performers are your go-to employees; the folks who can go all day long and carry the ball over the goal line (pick your cliché). At the other end of the spectrum are low performers. And low performers can present in a few different ways. Some low performers have poor skills and a lousy attitude while others have great skills and a lousy attitude and still other low performers have a great attitude, but they lack in the skills department.
And then there are the middle performers, and these employees are a notch down from your high performers; they have good skills and adequate attitude. And when we talk about maximizing middle performers, we’re not talking about turning good, solid employees into prima donnas with fantastic skills. That would be going in the reverse: turning middle performers into low performers with great skills and a lousy attitude. What we are talking about is accentuating all the positive things middle performers already do (from both a skills and an attitude point of view) and building on that. We want to help our middle performers unleash and maximize their full potential. And that may put them into the high performing category, or it may just move them slightly along in the middle performing territory, or it may just make them more fulfilled in the middle performing territory. But at no point are we ever suggesting that we’re going to take a middle performer who’s got good skills and good attitude and turn them into a low performer who’s got great skills and a lousy attitude.
Q: Given all that, what is the key to maximizing middle performers?
MM: Managers must know how to diagnose effectively what kind of middle performer they have. For example: is this somebody who doesn’t have the confidence in themselves to reach higher potential? Or is this person lacking the directives they need? Or does this person see the cost of being a high performer as a price that’s too high to pay? Those are just three of the types of middle performers you may be dealing with.
Once you diagnose your middle performers and you understand why they’re not maximizing their own potential, it becomes fairly easy to get them to that next level. So the challenge is in really understanding what kind of middle performer you’re dealing with. And you can’t look at 70% or 80% of your workforce and think they’re an amorphous mass; that all your middle performers are exactly the same. They’re not all the same. They are all very different from each other.
The first thing is to have a conversation with middle performers. Leadership IQ teaches a five-step conversation that will be part of our live webinar
Turning Middle Performers Into Stars. Basically, it’s a pretty casual one-on-one meeting that starts by letting middle performers know they’re doing a good job, but that we think they have more potential. We want this to be a conversation our middle performers are comfortable having so they remain open to hearing our feedback.
Next step is to move into some questions that assess what kind of middle performer this is. For example, if you want to learn if this is a middle performer who lacks the confidence to reach higher potential, you might ask, “I just told you I see untapped potential in you. Do you agree with me on that? Do you see that same potential in yourself?” If the employee says, “Yes, I do” then okay, great, we can assess that it is something other than confidence holding this person back and we move on and probe to find out what that is. And if they say “No,” we want to immediately ask, “Do you mind if I ask you why? Can you tell me more about that? Can you help me understand a little bit, what do you see, what don’t you see? What are the issues?”
The goal of this conversation is to help middle performers flesh things out and discover why they don’t see the same potential in themselves. It might be due to life history in which case you might hear, “I was never a high performer in anything.” Or it could be environmental where you hear, “I just don’t feel comfortable that I’m at the same level as our high performers. They seem to have so many more skills and degrees than I have.” These are two pretty common answers managers hear, but you may hear something radically different. You’ve got to get them talking and these are the kinds of questions that will help you do that.
