QuintEssentials: A Weekly Look at Leadership
Special to the Asheville Citizen-Times

It’s Time to Pull The Plug on Low Performers

Let’s try a little experiment. Are you sitting down? Good. Take a few deep breaths and visualize a calming scene. Relax your muscles. Feel the cares of the week float away. Now, think about your least favorite employee—the one who spreads negativity and dissent…or misses every other (non-payday) Friday due to conveniently timed “headaches”…or speaks rudely to customers…or works at a snail’s pace but seems to have unlimited time to shop online.

How do you feel now? Not so great, right? If you’re like most leaders, the mere mention of your resident “low performer” is enough to bring on a surge of jaw-tightening, gut-clenching stress.

And low performers don’t just harm you. They drive away your superstars, who refuse to work in an environment where such dismal performance is tolerated. They bring middle performers down to their level. They ignore customers—and meanwhile, everyone else is too busy picking up their slack in order to serve them properly.

While you may be able to effect short-term gains with low performers on board, your company will, inevitably, hit a psychological “wall” when the rest of the employees notice the performance gap between themselves and the slackers. Results will tail off—and a slow spiral into mediocrity will begin.

If you’re like many leaders, you’ve let these employees slide for a long time. Low performers are tenacious. They outlast everyone. In fact, you probably inherited yours from a predecessor. But operating with a low performer on staff is like dragging an anchor behind your company—and in a sluggish economy, you just can’t afford that.

Everyone in your company must be committed to peak performance. Everyone. And at Studer Group we’ve found that in the average company, some 34 percent of people will improve their performance and stay at their new higher level, 58 percent will do so if their behavior is properly reinforced, and 8 percent will flat-out refuse to budge.

Guess who those 8 percent are? Yep. Low performers. You’re not going to change them so you have to isolate them and move them out the door. You want to create a situation where you’re spending 92 percent of your time retaining the employees who really want to be there and 8 percent of your time with the 8 percent who don’t. (If you’re like many leaders, the inverse of that ratio is probably closer to your reality!)

In my book Results That Last I explain how to structure and implement a series of high-, middle- and low-performer conversations. This technique allows you to:

• Reward and re-recruit your high performers
• Coach your middle performers and move their performance up
• Confront your low performers on what they’re doing wrong, lay out the consequences that will befall them if they don’t stop the bad behavior, create an accountability trail that will allow you to get rid of them.

The conversations create an intolerable gap between your high and middle performers and your low performers. Perhaps your low performers will shape up—but probably not. That’s okay. While it’s never pleasant to fire someone, it’s almost always worth it in the long run.

Look at it this way: employees who had to deal with a low performer felt that they had a foot pressing down on their chests. When you fire him or her, the foot is pulled away. From there, great things will start to happen. So yes, you have to make that leap of faith—but it’s a leap that almost always takes you closer to becoming a high-performance organization.

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