First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently by Gallup Press

Author:Gallup Press
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Gallup Press
Published: 2016-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

Investing in Your Best Is the Only Way to Reach Excellence

The language of “average” is pervasive. Reservation centers calculate the average number of calls a customer service representative can handle in an hour. Restaurant chains project staffing needs by estimating how many servers they need to staff the average restaurant. Sales organizations divide up territories based on how many prospects the average salesperson can handle. Average is everywhere.

The best managers wouldn’t necessarily disagree with this kind of “average thinking.” They would admit that the effective management of a company requires some way of approximating what is going on every day within the company. However, they disagree vehemently when this average thinking bleeds into managing people. Unfortunately, it happens all the time.

They might not be aware of it, but many managers are fixated on average. In their minds, they have a clear idea of what they would consider to be an acceptable level of performance — what sales organizations often call a quota. This quota, this performance average, serves as the barometer against which each individual’s performance is assessed. So, for example, a manager may give her employees a rating based on how far above or below average their performance is. She may calculate her employees’ bonuses by figuring out the correct proportion of the average bonus each should receive. And, probably the most obvious symptom of average thinking, she may spend most of her time trying to help her strugglers inch their performance up above average, while leaving her above-average performers to their own devices.

This kind of average thinking is very tempting. It seems so safe and so practical. By focusing on your strugglers, you are protecting yourself and the company from their inevitable mistakes. Nonetheless, great managers reject it.

Here are a couple of reasons why. First, they don’t use average performance as the barometer against which each person’s performance is judged. They use excellence. From their perspective, average is irrelevant to excellence.

Second, they know that the only people who are ever going to reach excellence are the employees who are already above average. These employees have already shown some natural ability to perform the role. These employees have talent. Counterintuitively, employees who are already performing above average have the greatest room for growth. Great managers also know that it is hard work helping a talented person hone his talents. If a manager is preoccupied with the burden of transforming strugglers into survivors by helping them squeak above average, he will have little time left for the truly difficult work of guiding the good toward great.

Jean P.’s story illustrates both the irrelevance of average and the growth potential of talent.

For data entry roles, the national performance average is 380,000 keypunches per month, or 19,000 per day. Many companies use an average performance measure like this to determine how many data entry employees they need to hire. Upon hiring these data entry folk, a good manager should probably be able to raise his employees’ performance higher than this national average. How

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