About Leadership Attention
Today some managerial reflections. In the previous post I noted that teams always have strong (high) and weak (low) performers. In different senses. Both in terms of initiative put into work, and quality, and amount of work per unit of time. In short, it's a collective image, and a leader/manager/head intuitively and through certain metrics understands the place of each colleague on this spectrum. It doesn't depend on grade as much as it seems, it's a sum of factors.
And here's the dilemma I've been struggling with for quite a long time — who to devote your time and attention to? The one who carries the team? Or the one who falls behind? Any coincidences are accidental, this is purely a thought experiment. Obviously I'm simplifying. 🤭
The intuitive answer is the weak ones, because they need more help. You're interested in making sure no one on your team is underperforming. But on the other hand, it's obvious to me that with the strong ones you'll accomplish much more in the same time, plus they grow much faster because of this.
In this iteration I got interested enough to go commission research from several neural networks to tell me how it should be done. What does humanity think and write about this topic? Here's the summary:
- Time with a strong performer multiplies their productivity, this has more impact on overall output
- Strong performers should work where the maximum potential is
- A strong performer's development plan is clear, a weak one's is not
- Time with a weak performer often yields zero or negative results
- Weak performers demotivate the rest of the team and signal that standards don't matter
- Weak performers need to either be rotated to where their weaknesses become irrelevant, or parted with
To be fair, all this works well if you have both responsibility and authority at the same time. Otherwise you're acting more in your own interests than in the global interests of the business. When you're not actively harming, but not investing time where there's no personal benefit to you either. If you look at life quite pragmatically, the weak ones will disappear from it as soon as your paths diverge. But the strong ones will remain one way or another.