Leading Through

Distinguishing High Performance

Domain: Managing Others - Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

What distinguishes good vs. great employee performance? Many employees have a hard time understanding this in large part because many managers struggle to explain it.

The obvious and common answers are vague and unconvincing: go above and beyond, take initiative, be a team player, have a great attitude, etc. The problem is that most of us do some, if not all, of these things with at least some frequency. As a result, this generic guidance leaves the question unaddressed.

A lot of guidance online will point to specific soft skills as the answer. This is also problematic as not every role requires the same set of soft-skills.

For managers to conduct fair and consistent assessments of performance, it is important that they thoroughly understand the methodology that goes into the process in addition to the skills relevant to the role. If we as managers can't explain this for ourselves, it should call into question whether the assessments we make of others are even defensible.

The frustrating part of a more realistic answer is that high-performance designations are contextual. It's both an art and a science. The good news is that there are some basic common principles that can be used to support the approach. Here are just a few…

Opportunity

The first thing to consider is the context of the team's workload and responsibilities. How much opportunity for high performance has there been?

If a team is in a downturn and has a workload that equals only a third of their normal capacity, it will be hard to justify that anyone is exceeding expectations. On the opposite end, if a team is inundated with work, it provides more opportunity for strong performers to find the spotlight.

Understanding the context and level of opportunity is one of the most overlooked considerations when determining performance despite the fact that it helps guide the remaining criteria…

Results

Results matter, especially if the opportunity for performance is great. Someone being considered for a high-performer designation should always be delivering strong results that stand-out among their peers.

Those results will largely depend on the role; however, the manager should ensure that the results being measured are meaningful in helping the organization make progress towards its goals.

Behaviors and Methods

How you get results is also important. If you get great results but anger customers or alienate co-workers, it dampens your effectiveness. There are certainly case studies of extreme talents who get away with such behavior but they are rare and require an extreme intelligence or level of performance that is less common than most like to believe.

Effort

Effort is often confused with results, but they are two different things. You can demonstrate tremendous effort and see poor results. While results stand on their own, the level of effort someone is putting forth is still worth consideration.

Take two employees with similar results. One is demonstrating tremendous effort while the other is phoning-it-in. This is a consideration worth noting in the exercise of assessing performance. Effort alone is not going to make the difference, but it is a factor.

Put it Together

Once you've considered the above criteria, it's time to put it all together to form a well-rounded picture of an individual's performance.

Again, this is subjective. The weight of each of these criteria is going to depend on the details and context of the situation. It requires discretion on behalf of the manager, but at least there are now some consistent guidelines that can be used to measure performance of different individuals on the same team and in similar situations.