YOU WANT TO STOP banging your head against the wall and start succeeding? Start treating your people as if they have A LOT to offer. Start expecting excellence – hire for it, manage for it, lead with it.
Hire for enthusiastic and keep people that way by treating them as if you appreciate them, as if you can’t do without them and as if their success is what matters. Stop accepting mediocrity. Start rewarding excellence – EVEN if everyone is excellent. Rewarding average isn’t going to make you successful, rewarding excellence will.
There is a really interesting book that just came out by Julie Kampf entitled “From My Bad to My Best: How Individuals and Companies Can Differentiate Themselves in the Age of Mediocrity.” In it Julie talks about a trend today for companies to accept mediocrity as acceptable performance.
I hate to say it, but we brought this on ourselves. The day we used the word “competency” to describe what people were supposed to strive for, we made mediocre the standard. The day we bought into the bell curve where the majority had to scale into the middle, we made mediocre the standard. The day we began leaving a 15% tip for any kind of service in a restaurant, no matter how bad, we made mediocre the standard.
In organizations we have duped ourselves into thinking that making the majority ‘average’ in their performance (the bell curve, remember?) would make them want to work harder to be in the top few. We have convinced ourselves that excellence is for the few, not the many. Somehow we have bought into the notion that by telling someone that their best is never good enough they will strive to meet our ‘impossible’ standard. Because no matter what you do the majority will ALWAYS be in the middle of the bell curve. Remind you of a dysfunctional family? The same dynamics apply.
Instead we’ve developed a work force that, for the most part, is happy with average. If they get to keep their jobs and continue to get paid, then what’s the problem? The problem is that companies will not survive into the future if their work force settles for mediocrity. Average isn’t going to translate into profitability. As a top executive once told me,
I need people to be working at 150% but they are only working at 75%.”
That’s right. Because 75% is good enough. Even Microsoft, long known for its forced ranking system has changed their ways.
And you aren’t treating your employees as if they deserve more either. You put incompetent people in charge. You make people managers who don’t relate well to people. You reward success at the expense of others. You reward those who sell up well, not those who go the extra mile.
Mediocrity, not a poor product, or a super competitive marketplace, will kill your business. Look within first, you may be surprised by what you discover.
Rarely do people work at 100% at 100% of the time. I know if I work about 80%, my pulse rate and blood pressure rises. I also begin to see phantoms and double vision. Things get much worst when I drink coffee.
I think of productivity as if I’m leading a military unit. I can get them to march double time to reach the end goal faster. But then, I have to let them rest the next day. A lot of organizations and leaders do not factor in this rest period.
I totally agree Chris, I think this individual was making a point. She needed people to be fully engaged, to go the extra mile when needed and to bring their whole brain to work – all the time. Whether that looks like 80% or 150% is in the eyes of the beholder. I agree that all business has ebbs and flows, and this leader knew that. She was just frustrated as to the disengagement she saw. People didn’t care, they ‘dialed it in’ most of the time and weren’t applying their skills and talents to the business challenges they faced. No one can work at 150% or even 100% all the time. As i always say “that’s what tomorrow is for”.
To be successful we need people and we need to care enough about these people to provide training and to develop them, listen to them and help them to engage and be a part of the success. They need to believe that you are their voice and you must demonstrate this by your actions.
People that are engaged and invested in your brand will provide innovation, open communication, growth and dynamic change.
And this, Larry, I have come to believe is the bottom line. We are often so worried about ‘leadership’ that we forget that exceptional people managers is what is going to get us to the next business level. We say, ‘are you a leader or a manager’, as if ‘manager’ is a bad thing. We forget to hire for, promote for and teach our people managers the criticality of doing exactly as you said – “to care enough…listen to them…help them to engage…and be part of the success”. You can’t make a profit for long without it.
…and how easy it becomes to discover how comfy status quo is. It almost feels ‘safe’, doesn’t it?! Great information here and thank you Beth Banks Cohn and for for sharing because this is a topic that is invaluable – the variety of inviting discussions is endless, too 🙂
“Mediocrity, not a poor product, or a super competitive marketplace, will kill your business. Look within first, you may be surprised by what you discover” (Banks Cohn, 2017) says it all~
Thanks for your comments Jennifer. I think of the status quo as that big comfy but ugly chair in your living room. You love it, can’t imagine being without it but it really needs to go because it will never match any decor, ever.
I don’t see anything wrong with using a bell curve as such. The problem is that the bell has slipped from where it used to be to a less competent and more mediocre level. Why?
Part of the problem is that we now have supervisors and managers that have always gotten a trophy for just showing up and they think that is the way to run a business. Show up sober regularly, do a mediocre job and you get a reward. That may work in little leagues (though doubtful) but it doesn’t work in business.
Hi Ken, I think the bell curve is what drives the behavior you describe. I don’t disagree that we have individuals working that got trophies from Little League just for showing up, but I think it is deeper than that. I think that the bell curve perpetuates the ‘just showing up’ behavior because most people are just going to be rated as average no matter what they actually do. So those individuals revert back to ‘just showing up’ because their bosses aren’t going to reward them anyway. It is a vicious and downward spiral.
I enjoyed your article and reading your perspective. I’m thinking of this in a slightly different aspect.
Interesting that a manager needed his people working at 150% but they were at 75%. I don’t know the back story here, but given enough time on the job with effort of 150% demanded, it sounds to me like the employees are half used up. I know that’s not the point of our article and I agree that some employees settle for average aka mediocre.
I see another underlying thread though. Is it possible that expectations are not clearly set and therefore people don’t understand what they need to do to achieve the next level of expertise? They might want to work more productively but don’t know where to expend the effort that will contribute most significantly to the company’s vision.
Employee engagement isn’t a new concept although as a buzz word, it’s fresh out of prep school. To be engaged, people need to feel like they have a place where their work makes a difference, that they have a place to belong, and that they are appreciated – they – not just their hours or tasks completed. If people know what is expected of them, know they are appreciated, can see that what they do has an impact on the organization, their competence and quality of their work will improve. If it doesn’t that’s an opportunity for the manager to help the person find a job where they can be productive doing work they love at a place where they belong.
Hi Jane,
Thanks for your comment. I think what you say is true, that people need to know what is expected of them and that employees are more engaged when they know that and when they feel appreciated. And that is my point. That employees are only appreciated to the point they are put on the bell curve. Excellence is not rewarded, even if it is appreciated, because most people are average on that curve. It is my experience that people generally know what is expected of them – although there are always exceptions to that of course. And I think many companies are highly aware of the role that employee engagement plays in productivity. But often companies forget that a critical piece of that is good people management and rewarding excellence, no matter where it happens.
I really appreciate your response. To be more specific, this is something I have heard from many sources over my 30 year career. Places where they ‘grade’ on a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being exceptional, the employee asks the manager how they can earn a 4 or earn a 5. Or maybe they scored a 2 and want to know what they have to do to get to 3 or 4. I’m not making this up. Not one manager ever offered to coach, counsel, or put into writing some specific things that would help them hit that target. I’m talking here about 4 different organizations and at least 20 people over the years.
Goals, objectives, and vision are wonderful in theory, but employees want to know what hurdles they must jump or milestones they must pass to achieve something better than that curve you mention.
Hi Jane,
I couldn’t agree more with what you say. It is a sad commentary on managers when they can’t help employees understand what a ‘4’ or ‘5’ looks like. Even worse is when the manager says ‘very few people get a 4 or 5, you need to walk on water basically’ (this is what a manager of mine said once during my time inside of a large corporation. That is where mediocrity comes from – it isn’t just the failure to explain, it is the failure to recognize ‘4’ or ‘5’ work. Sometimes it is hard to know which comes first. My challenge to all of us is let’s do something about it. From the inside and from the outside.
Thank you Beth. Very nice article! I think you believe in potential of people… in outstanding human qualities more than so-called average capability… particularly those qualities relating to the ability of interacting with others… You believe in 360° excellence… You believe in people who believe in what they’re doing… If that’s the case, I agree with you completely. That’s right… “look within first…” – I used to call what you said in your article “myth of depersonalized business”, where “mediocrity” is the general practice. There is a lot more that needs to be said… and I hope that we will have other opportunities to say it. Thank you again Beth.
Thank you Massimo. A ‘myth of depersonalized business’ it is. We both need to talk about this more often. I look forward to saying more, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts as well.
Thanks for your post. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and reading about how to better engage employees. A lot of it has to do with setting up environments where employees are trusted to do the right things and make the right decisions, and recognized for when they go above and beyond. Even more, it has to do with regular, transparent communication that is two-way. A great read I just completed was A World Gone Social, which discusses how employees have a greater social voice now, and if companies are not using that as an opportunity to engage, then they are losing an opportunity to keep people focused on the big prize.
Hi Kelly,
I agree that the best way to engage employees is to trust them to do what you hired them to do, and give them the space to do it. Communication is always key – I have said many times that no one ever says to senior management “you are communicating too much” or “you are listening too much”. And I agree that social media can be utilized by companies to engage and focus employees and isn’t. Last night I saw a demo of some apps meant to engage patients. Companies should put that kind of know how to work inside their own companies. The results could be amazing.