Prioritize Performance and Position Star Players

So by this part in the blog series, you’ve hopefully learned quite a bit on your way to improving performance.

• You’ve identified your exemplary performers.

• You see the significant upside potential of leveraging the insight of your stars to shift the performance curve.

• You more than likely are right where you need to be in order to move forward. And most organizations provide a “target rich” environment for your performance improvement efforts. 

Now what?

Remember the file you set up at the beginning of this blog series to list your performance improvement initiatives. Now, it is time to prioritize them.  

• Identify the roles most critical to executing your business strategy. (Don’t just look at the organization charts. A-positions are core to the firm’s business strategy; high performing employees in these key positions provide significant competitive differentiation. 

• Determine the variance in performance for incumbents in these critical roles.  Then you calculate the percentage of A-players, B-players, and C-players currently occupying these strategically critical positions in your organization. Then the math is simple; you act quickly to get C-players out of A-positions, and work just as quickly to shift the performance of any B-players in these positions to more closely replicate the performance of your stars.

• Estimate the impact of decreasing any variance so that everyone is performing more like your current stars.

Organizations face many challenges today, and unfortunately too many companies struggle to bridge the gap between strategy and results.  By that, I mean they create solid, logical, and even bold plans, but find they are unable to properly execute them.  It is the rare company that includes leveraging the insights of their stars as a critical component of effectively implementing their strategic plans.

Strategic goals must be turned into measureable results.  One of the most effective ways to achieve this is to leverage the insights of your current exemplary performers—who already contribute significantly to implementing your strategy and do so within your current culture and work systems. 

Can you share an example or case where a star in your organization is pushing the performance barrier and achieving unbelievable goals? Perhaps you can share your example via the blog.

For more on how to shift the performance curve, check out Paul’s previous blog article in this series.