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I tend to think about employees in four categories. And the way I create that matrix is to plot an employee’s performance, how well they do their job on one axis. And on the other axis is their values, that they embrace the values of the organization. If you think about performance versus values, in the upper right hand corner, what you have is an employee who’s got very good performance and really embraces the values of the organization, and that, of course, is your star.
And here’s the story with your star. You cannot love them enough. And a lot of times, we just sort of forget about the star. They’re doing their job. We love them, and we say good job, and we sort of leave it to them to understand what a great job they’re doing. We do not pay enough attention to them and show them all the respect and admiration and gratitude we have for them. Typically, your star is an achiever, and they want to know that they’re achieving. They want to be validated. You’ve got to say to them, this is what I love about you. You’ve got to keep their job getting bigger and bigger because they’re going to be hungry for more growth, and you’ve got to talk to them about why you love the values that they’re demonstrating. So the star, you’ve got to coddle and love and celebrate. People are scared of building the egos of of stars. It’s crazy. It’s backwards. The more love you give them, the harder they’ll work. They’ve already proven that. So don’t be scared of your stars. Celebrate your stars or they will leave because they can.
Now down in the other quadrant, of course, low performance and low values. I call these individuals the departed because they should be departed from your organization because they are dragging down the team, and I guarantee they’re taking up more of your time than you’d like and should be spending. With your departed, you’ve got to say, “I don’t know what you’re still doing here. There’s certainly work that’s better for you, and you’re not a bad person. You’re just not a fit with this organization. Let us help you find the right job for you. Let us find something that is really a better match for your aptitudes or an organization that’s a better fit with your values.” But you’ve got to move them out the door because they are ennervating the rest of your team. And if you think your team doesn’t know who’s got the low performance and the low values, you are mistaken. They know. And they’re sitting there saying, “How can they possibly be walking the talk if they’re keeping so-and-so around?”
The headache is a really difficult employee to manage because what they are doing is they have fantastic performance typically, and they don’t have the values. They don’t embrace the values. And I call those the headaches because you love their performance. You need their performance, and you can’t make them comply with the importance of the values. And they make everyone around them miserable, and sometimes they make you miserable. This is a gigantic headache for most team leaders, and you have to face right into it. First, you have to ask yourself, “Am I communicating well enough about the values?” Maybe they just don’t know them, but you’ve got to sit down with that employee or with your whole team and say, “Let’s go over our values again. They’re not just words. They’re behaviors. Let’s get clear on what those behaviors actually look like.” Let’s make sure that that headache knows what the values actually are, and then you’ve got to catch them in the moment when they’re not demonstrating the values and pull them aside and say, “You know, we’ve got that value of urgency, and you didn’t answer Mary’s email for three weeks. What is that about? That’s actually not our values.” So you’ve got to get on top of what the problem is and, you know, you can congratulate them around their performance, but you’ve got to ride herd on those values.
The last type of employee is so hard. I call it the heartache because what happens is that this person has low to medium performance, but they’re so good on the values. They are truly collaborative. They are very urgent. You want something done, they do it. The customers love them. Their coworkers love them. There’s something that’s very, lovable and admirable about them, but they can’t deliver on the performance. They can’t hit the numbers. They can’t do what we’ve got to do to stay even with the competition. They cause you a lot of heartache. You want to keep them. And my advice on this is to keep on giving them another chance and another chance. And sometimes you have to change the work so that they are doing what they’re better at because those values are very valuable to you. But here’s the thing that we typically do as managers, and you’re going to cringe because you’re going to recognize yourself in this, is what we do is we keep them, and then we hire on top of them somebody to do their job. We can’t bring ourselves to fire them, and then we double the cost by hiring somebody who can do their job. And everybody looks, and they know exactly what’s going on. There are very different challenges with each one of these types of employees. There’s not one size fits all.