Brandon Laws: Welcome to the Transform Your Workplace podcast. I’m Brandon Laws, your host, and I’ve got Paige Tamlyn with me. This is round two.
Paige Tamlyn: Round two! We’re refining this.
Brandon Laws: I did not check the memory card in my handy digital recorder. So Paige, we’re going to do this podcast again a second time. This is going to be fun.
Paige Tamlyn: Yeah. You’re tired of hearing me talk by this point.
Brandon Laws: What’s our topic for today, Paige? You brought me this and I think it’s going to be really exciting.
Paige Tamlyn: So this conversation kind of came up when I was talking to – so I report to Lacey who’s another frequent guest of yours. We were talking about the two schools of thought about how managers should spend their time. Do you spend most of your time coaching your lowest performers, people who need the most feedback, or do you spend your time with your high potential rising stars?
There are these two different schools of thought out in the business world right now about where you should spend your time. So …
Brandon Laws: If I’m speaking for everybody, I think – it seems like managers are spending more time with their weaker employees.
Paige Tamlyn: That’s kind of the traditional approach, right? And it seems, when you think about it, the most logical approach. Like, this person needs the most help. I’m going to spend my time helping them. So …
Brandon Laws: I think there are implications. High performers feel neglected. You don’t even know if you can improve your lower performers.
Paige Tamlyn: Right.
Brandon Laws: Maybe they’re in the wrong role. Maybe they don’t have the right skills and maybe they’re not willing and able.
Paige Tamlyn: Yeah. I think it all depends on what your lowest performers are struggling with, right? Are they things that can be coached or are they things that are a learned behavior that’s not easy to unwind or they’re not a good culture fit because, as we all know, the culture fit thing, if they’re not a fit, you can’t change it. That’s just how they are and so – and it’s either right or wrong. It’s just not a good fit. So those are the things you can’t really change.
But if they’re just kind of minor things or just trying to get through to how you guys run as a company. Those are things that you can coach. But there are some things that are kind of like a lost cause. It seems like a really bad term.
Brandon Laws: Oh, that’s harsh. That’s harsh.
Paige Tamlyn: You know, just being honest, right? At some point, you just kind of throw in the towel and say, “This isn’t working,” and honestly a lot of times, they feel it too. It’s just mutual.
Brandon Laws: If you put in tons of time and energy, then at some point it could become a lost cause. So I agree with you on that.
Paige Tamlyn: Yeah.
Brandon Laws: There’s a quote that I found in an article that you sent me. The article is about why you should focus more on your top performers than your low ones. This is by Alex Paley. The quote says, “We naturally want to invest resources into helping that person develop. But sometimes that investment can eat a disproportionate amount of our own time and energy.”
I think it’s a valid point. We all have a finite amount of time, as managers, as employees. And if you spend most of your time or all of your time with lower performers, then is that the best use of resources in terms of time?
Paige Tamlyn: Right.
Brandon Laws: I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that.
Paige Tamlyn: I don’t know that I know the answer either. I mean who knows the answer? I think you could find people on both sides of the argument that say no, you should spend most of your time with your high performers and no, you really do need to spend most of your time with your low performers. I think it just depends on where all of your people sit and what they need and where you should spend your time.
But it might be different depending on your industry and your organization too, right? If you’re a Fortune 500 company and you’ve got loads of people working for you, right? And the low performers are probably going to either weed themselves out and self-select out. Maybe you should be spending all of your time with high performers. I don’t know. I mean …
Brandon Laws: Well, OK, I will go all the way to the foundational level. I’m a parent. I have two kids, young age. I love that book Mindset by Carol Dweck – it really talks about focusing on the effort and rewarding effort and strengths and things like that.
So when you’re talking to a child, you want to reward the good behavior and the effort that they’re putting into it because they’re more likely to want to keep doing that.
Paige Tamlyn: Yeah.
Brandon Laws: Versus if you give attention to the things they’re doing wrong. I would imagine – OK, an adult, if you focus on the low performers and the skills you don’t have and the weaknesses, my guess is it transforms the culture in a negative way versus if you focused on high performance, new skills, learning, development, all those things that would develop and grow people.
Paige Tamlyn: Well, yeah.
Brandon Laws: It’s an easy argument that I point out, right?
Paige Tamlyn: Yeah, it’s the psychological response of ‘if I do this, I get positive reinforcement that this was accepted and this was a good thing’ versus ‘I did this thing and it doesn’t get a good reaction or I’m being punished for it.’
So it goes back to – I studied early childhood education through high school and college – so there’s that psychological response and it’s the same thing in the workplace, right?
If I’m a manager and I’m rewarding somebody, even somebody else – so somebody who’s a low performer sees me responding to somebody positively doing something. Wouldn’t they want that as well?
Brandon Laws: Yeah.
Paige Tamlyn: ‘Oh man, they got recognized for doing this really awesome thing. I want a piece of that too.’
Brandon Laws: Yeah. To me it seems like if you focused on something positive – to your point – the other employees would naturally want to do that as well, versus if you focus on the alternative.
I think you would damage the culture and I think the top performers probably want to leave too.
Paige Tamlyn: Yeah. Well, that’s the thing too is, how engaged are your top performers? If they’re people who are super solid, maybe they’ve been with your organization for a while, they know the impact they’re making, they hear it from people, they see it with their customers, whatever it is, and they’re totally invested in it, they might not need as much time from you. Just occasional, like some positive encouragement. Like thank you for just like getting down in that grind and doing your work, right?
Brandon Laws: Yeah.
Paige Tamlyn: And that might be enough for them. But if they’re the kind of person who needs constant positive reinforcement and they’re not hearing from you, they’re turning around and saying, “Wow, this person who I acknowledge and may be a low performer,” right? Maybe they spend a lot of time doing stuff for them too. That’s the worst, right? When they’re like fixing a lot of their work and then they’re seeing their manager spend all their time with that person, it’s a crappy feeling probably, right?
When they’re spending all of their time with this person who – you know, maybe they know it’s not a good fit.
Brandon Laws: I think it’s a two-way street when it comes to communication about what each person needs. So as an employee or a high performer at that, I think the high performer needs to say, “Hey look, I need you to check in. I need you to publicly recognize me. I need you to spend time coaching and developing me in these areas because I feel like those are some areas I can improve on. I need you to tell me my blind spots.”
Paige Tamlyn: Yeah. Tell me how I can grow myself.
Brandon Laws: Yeah. Both sides need to explain what they need from each other because they may simply want you to just leave them alone and –
Paige Tamlyn: That would be totally simple. You could be overthinking it, right? Have you made that assessment of each member of your team – what motivates them? There’s a motivating factor sheet that you can – I’m sure you can Google it and figure it out. Most millennials are driven by money. I’d like to throw that out there. We all know that. But there are other –
Brandon Laws: And praise.
Paige Tamlyn: That’s true. But like what kind of praise, right? Is it private? I am a person who likes words of affirmation. I love like handwritten notes. I love a really nice email. I have an email – I have a folder in my Outlook that says “nice things, or “feel good” I think is what I’ve called it, and every time I get some kind of positive reinforcement, encouragement, feedback, whatever it is, I drag it over there and I look at it every once in awhile.
Brandon Laws: We’ve all got those.
Paige Tamlyn: If I’m having a bad day, I just look through it. I’m like, no, I’m doing OK. I’m having one bad day. But that might not work for somebody else who wants recognition in front of other people, who wants to be motivated some other way.
Brandon Laws: Yeah.
Paige Tamlyn: So if you’re not making that individual assessment of your team, you’re kind of missing out –
Brandon Laws: Yeah. I think it’s the risk in spending so much time with the lower performers. You’re spending all of your time doing that and not giving any praise.
Paige Tamlyn: Yeah.
Brandon Laws: Or checking in. Then it’s going to be damaging.
Paige Tamlyn: Well, I’m sorry. How crappy is that? He was a manager, right? I think we’ve talked about this before. Nobody wants to micromanage. Do you get up in the morning and say, “I know what I want to do today. I want to hover over people and make sure that they’re doing everything.” No, nobody wants to do that.
Brandon Laws: What a terrible use of time.
Paige Tamlyn: Well, really and so again, it’s the two schools of thought. Do I want to spend all of my time micromanaging somebody who I know that the return on investment is not long term.
Brandon Laws: Yeah.
Paige Tamlyn: Or do I spend my time with my high performers, my rising stars, whatever it is that you’ve categorized them as? And we will talk about that in a second, how you can kind of group your people. But where do you want to spend your time? It goes back to that psychological response of, if I give positive reinforcement, where is that going to get me?
Brandon Laws: I think what the bare minimum managers could do is let the star performers know what kind of contribution impact they’re making. Maybe they know about the contribution. But do they know what kind of impact it’s making on the wider organization?
Paige Tamlyn: Yeah.
Brandon Laws: Maybe they don’t know that and if they –
Paige Tamlyn: Yeah, they have no visibility to that and you do if you’re a higher level person, a senior leader in the organization. They probably don’t know that this is the impact that they’re having. So they can maybe take a guess or we can tell them.
Brandon Laws: Yeah, I think that’s the bare minimum that managers probably need to do in this case. So talk about the nine-box strategy because that’s a really fascinating thing. That would tie in really well to this discussion.
Paige Tamlyn: Yeah. The Lominger nine-box I think has been around for quite some time. There are different kinds of categories that you can put employees into, different words. But most of them are pretty similar when you kind of look around. So it’s basically a nine-box chart and you can chart your group into basically a potential assessment and a performance assessment from low, moderate to high.
You can have somebody who’s considered a rough diamond who’s maybe a low performer but is high potential. You know, if they’re sitting on the school of thought of maybe that’s the person I need to spend the most time with because they do have the highest amount of potential and they just need a little bit of help. Or are they a high performer, low potential. Like they’re probably going to leave the organization at some point. So what am I going to do about that? Do I want to try and retain them or are they kind of a talent risk? They’re low performer, low potential and I think historically that’s where most managers have spent their time is in that lower box.
So it’s a box and you could basically plot out everybody on your team in this matrix and there’s some action planning that you have to do once you’ve kind of plotted people out. But it’s just kind of a visual for managers to say, OK, I’ve got employees all over the place here and I need to figure out how to get them all into this one high performer, high potential category and keep them there.
Brandon Laws: Yeah. I would imagine that once you start plotting people within these little boxes, you would probably know where to spend your time because if you have somebody that’s in that red box for talent risk, there’s no hope. They’re low performers and they have no potential. So why would you want to spend all your time there?
Paige Tamlyn: Well, and to me too, it’s about how long they have been there. Have they been in that box for nine months?
Brandon Laws: Oh, yeah.
Paige Tamlyn: And they’ve been in that box for a month. Did they just move? OK, what was the trigger point then that moved them or are they midway between two boxes? We might have some people that are right on the border and you think ‘I really need to focus my time on them because they’re at risk for moving from one to the other and I need to lift them back up.’
Brandon Laws: Yeah.
Paige Tamlyn: But yeah, they’ve been there forever.
Brandon Laws: Yeah. This visual is really helpful. I imagine that the work comes in too. What’s the action plan? Because if I have some that are in the future stars, they – OK, they’re moderate performers but they have high potential. So I need to build an action plan that gets them to where they can be to meet their potential versus like a consistent star. They’re high performer and high potential.
I don’t know that I need to spend a lot of time with them. But it’s probably more words of encouragement and making sure that I’m checking in and coaching them to keep achieving what they’re achieving.
Paige Tamlyn: Well, and do they know that they’re in that box?
Brandon Laws: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Paige Tamlyn: If you are a high performer, a high potential person, I want to make sure that you know that. What can I do to make sure that that doesn’t change? Sometimes it’s having a very frank conversation.
Brandon Laws: Yeah. Paige, you’re a talent risk. You’re a low performer and low potential.
Paige Tamlyn: Like maybe don’t use those words if you’ve got somebody in the low category. But I mean, to your point though, if they are a high potential, high performer, maybe they already know that too. It’s just like you said, it’s the little words of encouragement: ‘thank you so much for just getting down to it and grinding every day, I really appreciate how much you do for us.’ It could just be really as simple as that.
Brandon Laws: Well, this is a fun discussion. I think it’s something that we should talk about more often – how we’re spending our time with employees. I’m curious to know what listeners think too. Are you spending more time with your lower performers, your higher performers? Have you even thought about it?
Paige Tamlyn: Yeah.
Brandon Laws: Maybe you don’t even know where or how you’re spending your time. So I’d be curious to know what you’re doing. Reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter, Instagram, one of those areas. I would love to start a conversation. Paige, thanks for coming on. Anything else that we should know about with this?
Paige Tamlyn: No. I’m super curious to know what people are doing out there. I think the schools of thought are so vastly different. I will be curious to see. So hopefully we can get a little discussion going.
Brandon Laws: Well, have a good day Paige. Thank you.