The world is made up of C players – those where are totally average in performance. Let’s face it, most of us have to be C players, and your organization will always be made up of them. However, even though someone has to be average, we can always hope that the average keeps getting better. In part, this has to do with talent management and trying to improve the entire workforce in incremental amounts. But it’s equally important to focus on the C player as it is to focus on the A’s and B’s.
C players’ mediocre performance pulls down their company’s performance by:
- blocking talented employees’ advancement,
- calling their bosses’ judgment into question,
- encouraging a C-player mentality in others, and
- repelling valuable people. ((Axelrod, Beth, Handfield-Jones, Helen and Michaels, Ed. January, 2002. “A New Game Plan for C Players” Harvard Business Review.))
HBR’s approach to C players includes many interesting tactics, but I found their “talent management must haves” quite interesting.
In order to cultivate managerial talent at all levels of the company, leaders should adhere to the following five imperatives, which distinguish high-performing companies from average ones. The imperatives are the subject of our book, The War for Talent.
- Embrace a talent mind-set, and make talent management a critical part of every manager’s job.
- Create a winning “employee value proposition” that provides a compelling reason for a highly talented person to join and stay with your company.
- Rebuild your recruiting strategies to inject talent at all levels, from many sources, and to respond to the ebbs and flows in the talent market.
- Weave development into the organization by deliberately using stretch jobs, candid feedback, coaching, and mentoring to grow every manager’s talents.
- Differentiate the performance of your people, and affirm their unique contributions to the organization. The fifth imperative includes and goes beyond dealing explicitly with low performers. It addresses the broader need to differentiate the strong players from the weak players in a company’s entire talent pool, and it implies the need to invest in and grow A and B performers. ((Ibid))
For more details and specifics, check out the HBR article, free on the web.
4 responses to “Making Your Average Employee Your Best Employee”
systematicHR – Human Resources Strategy and Technology » Making Your Average Employee Your Best Employee
Beth, Handfield-Jones, Helen and Michaels, Ed. January, 2002. “A New Game Plan for C Players” Harvard Business Review. [back] Ibid [back] Thank you for reading the Tribute Media Human Resources News Feed. Please check the original post here:systematicHR – Human Resources Strategy and Technology. The purpose of this feed it to provide information to the greatest audience possible. In addition, we can drive inbound links to your blog. If you would like to have your blog featured or removed from here or in any of our other newsfeeds, please
As usual, the essential truth is missed in this (and most any) discussion of A, B, and C players. The truth is that you can’t talk about the player without talking about the game.
Randy Moss: as a Viking, he is all bad attitude punctuated by brilliant moments. Won’t block, won’t stop talking trash and won’t stop acting out. As a Patriot, he blocks hard, says the right things, and performs steadily. The same man, but a different regime.
A passel of great players can be a trap: too many high performers can lead to chronic understaffing and underdevelopment – the so called farm team suffers because it does not appear to be needed, but in the end, it always is, because the nature of all human achievement is ethereal.
The best leaders understand that any A player can move to a C status very quickly, and sometimes (far less often) C players can move to an A if the environment is right.
The very best leaders build machines that consistently perform regardless of the precise talent that they have access to at any given time- always assuming of course that the talent systems successfully eliminate or mitigate D, E, and F players at early stages.
The best leaders recognize that true game-changers can come from any direction and in any form- the worst employee anyone ever saw may produce (or facilitate the production of)a transformative idea (sometimes by accident) or an innovation that may lift the whole organization.
The very best leaders understand that performance is not only about metrics or even any conventional measure of success- human beings are vastly complex animals and there is a great deal we don’t fully understand about emotional engagement, reaction and uses of symbols, totems, etc, political game theory and practice, and other elements that can change behavior, opinions, and motivations.
Trying to separate, analyze, and control performance in the context of individual people is a fool’s game, and the history of warfare, politics, and business shows that to be true. How many times has a C or D player risen to control the fates of hundreds or thousands of A players ?
Too many to count.
The great leaders of tomorrow will face the complexity head-on and will learn to treat performance as a dynamic system encompassing elements far beyond what an employee does at any given time and place.
Interesting that none of the HBR “must haves” give any idea how to turn your average employees better.
The difference between the US and Europe/UK that is caused by employment law and culture is interesting. Over in Europe we have much more protection, therefore strategies such as cutting the bottom 10% just can’t be used. We’ve had companies adopt “best practice” which has come from the US to catastrophic effect. One company I worked with had told 10% of their employees that they were basically not wanted, but they had nowhere to go and were on pretty substantial final salary pensions. They sat there feeling unwanted but trapped. I’ve also seen UK workers – including the “haves” as well as the “have nots” – react very badly to reward strategies that create high reward differentials. We’re inherently more socialist, so those that did well felt guilty, while those that didn’t were left feeling resentful.
Talent management seems to generally assume that your best performers = your best talent, but perhaps your talent ID could be the problem and you have many “C” performers that, given the opportunity, could be “A”s.