PMETH

Great leaders know that you don't treat everyone equally.  In organizations led by exemplary leaders fairness is not treating all alike. Leaders know that in the context of business, fairness doesn't mean sameness; fairness means people get exactly what they have earned and deserve based on past performance: nothing more and nothing less. This means that not everyone gets the same schedule, compensation, raises, time and attention, latitude or discretion.

For instance, if you have Employee A that has a positive attitude, does great work, has initiative, exceeds expectations, is intelligent, and generally outperforms Employee B.  If management treats employee A and B exactly the same—that is, give them the same pay, same raises, same bonuses, same perks—where is the incentive for Employee A to continue exceeding expectations.  And if you are afraid Employee B will leave if he finds out about the perks, so what?  If they do leave then you’ll be left with an excellent performer and the opportunity to go out and find another excellent performer.  But if you continue to treat the top performer exactly the same as the mediocre performer, either the good employee is going to leave and you are left with the mediocre performer or if the top performer stays, he is going to stop exceeding expectations and then you will be left with two mediocre performers. 

It just makes sense that the top performer will inevitably stop exceeding expectations if there is no additional benefit being derived from the additional effort.  Now some people are self-motivated and will keep performing but it is unfair to that person for their efforts to go unrecognized and unrewarded.  A primary responsibility of good leadership is to be a good steward of resources and this can only be accomplished by giving your best to the best and less to the rest.

Effective leaders hold others accountable for results and their behaviors. They care enough to confront employees who are off track, slacking, underperforming or otherwise not measuring up. They know that holding people accountable is nothing to apologize for.  Instead, sugarcoating, trivializing and marginalizing performance issues for fear of offending and allowing their people to remain deluded and living in a gray area—THAT is something to apologize for.

For instance, if you have an employee that is not performing or progressing at the rate you think they should be performing, it is your responsibility and you owe it to them to sit them down and tell them the areas where they are not measuring up and areas where they need to improve; and you need to be specific. 

If you are a manager or a supervisor and you have people working under you, and if you don’t sit them down and tell them what they are doing wrong, you are doing them a disservice.  This is an integral part of overseeing people.  How are they supposed to improve if they don’t know they are doing a poor job?  And if you don’t sit them down tell them, you are not doing your job so how can you expect them to do theirs!

As great leaders we need to teach our people that when they choose a behavior they choose the consequences for that behavior.  In other words, when an employee chooses to come in late, chooses to project a lousy attitude, chooses not to follow up with clients or adhere to company policy that they chose the pathetic paycheck that comes along with that behavior.  No one did it to them; they did it to themselves. They are not victims.

And while we are on the subject of “victims” an example of this is the employee who is at work 70 hours a week but spends half that time complaining about how many hours she works.  I am so sick of employees that go on and on and on about how many hours they work as compared to their peers but spend half that time complaining and B-Sing.  I think these people need to ask themselves why they need to work so many hours and their peers don’t.    

Employees shouldn’t be given credit for 70 hours of face time.  It’s our jobs as managers to evaluate how productive people actually are while they are at the office and hold people accountable and really pay attention to which employees are more efficient and productive.

People Make Extraordinary Things Happen! ^™