Let’s be honest. Not every employee is, or can be, a top performer. Most are not. So the real question, the important question, is how do you improve on average?
Mediocrity is a mixture of skills, knowledge, potential and attitude, so says author Rymer Rigby. “So, an employee could be underperforming because they don’t understand their job fully, they lack the potential to do it, or because they cannot be bothered or they are unengaged.”
UK executive coach Tom Preston said that in today’s workplace, it is usually one of the last two. He believes that many skills are commoditized so that the real driver of performance is attitude.
If that is the case, then the real art of managing is to take average people and inspire them to become above average performers.
To do that requires a recruiting process that develops deep profiles on candidates so the managers will know how to communicate and motivate each new member of the team. Recruiters that do not produce that level of candidate intelligence are failing their client.
Recruiting, building a candidate panel is tough work. It is time consuming and costly – when done right. When the recruiting process is designed around the concept that finding talent is only the beginning of a process then it will produce a team that can rise to an above average level of performance – to be the best they can be.