This document provides 10 tips for improving people performance in organizations. The key focus areas are recruitment and selection, performance management, and people development. It emphasizes the importance of hiring the right people, creating thorough job profiles, identifying top performers, understanding why some people perform better than others, using development needs analysis, considering options like retraining or reassigning underperformers, measuring performance before and after development plans, and ensuring factors like awareness, competence, motivation, and support.
If you have ever hired someone who, in time, proved to be far different from the person you thought you hired, you already know how important it is to know all you can about the people you hire – before you hire them. If you’ve hired or promoted someone who failed to live up to your expectations, you know how disappointing it was for both of you. <CLICK>
On the positive side, remember the joy of being pleasantly surprised when someone you’ve hired turned out to be much better than you expected. That’s the person who was good enough to hire but became one of your best performers. Happily, not all hiring surprises are bad.
The point to consider is the method or methods you used to select the superior performer and the disappointing performer. Was it the same method? In most cases, employers tell us their hiring process treats all candidates the same. Sometimes it picks very good employees and sometimes it picks unsatisfactory ones. Why is it that employers who always want to hire the very best continue to use a selection system that gives inconsistent results? If a company discovered a defect in a manufacturing process, would they not take immediate steps to correct the fault? Why then are businesses complacent when their hiring process fails them? The fact is, conventional approaches, to putting people into jobs, are as likely to hire the below-average performer as they are to hire the above-average performer. It is time to change that! When asked how they came to hire poor-performers, employers say things like...
Think about the last time you were looking for a job and were being interviewed, consider the strategy you used. Who did you present to the interviewer or interviewers? Was it the real you, “warts and all,” or was it a highly polished version of you? If you’re like most job seekers you were on your best behavior and presented yourself as being perfect for the company’s position. As an employer, you would do well to think of people as being somewhat like icebergs when you are interviewing them – they float in looking powerful and pure as the driven snow. You are impressed. They are exactly what you are looking for. Then, after they’ve been hired and, after a time, revert to their core behaviors you get to know who they really are. You find they are much more than you saw in the interview! <CLICK>
Sometimes what we get is much more valuable than what we thought we were getting – and we have that wonderful experience of hiring someone who greatly exceeds the expectations that we had for them. Yes, many people who do not interview especially well, turn out to be exceptionally conspicuous superior performers. But other times, that seven-eights that floats below the surface unseen is what can make an employee a liability rather than an asset to your company. That’s where we get the comments such as “If I had only known.” Obviously, you would have avoided hiring these people had you known. Hindsight is always 20/20. Although they are too often the basis of hiring decisions, interviews simply cannot see below the surface of the individual, cannot give you the information you need to have to make a good decision when you put someone into one of your positions <CLICK>
You’ll recall that the study indicated that people perform at a superior level when they are matched to the work they do. If you think about your own experience and your company’s own superior producers, I think you’ll conclude you all fit your jobs. If you didn’t, you couldn’t sustain your level of performance <CLICK> Superior performers can deal with the mental and intellectual demands of their positions. They can handle whatever level of information processing is required of them in the position. This is true of all superior performers. Why, even what you might consider the lowliest position, it has some requirement for the person doing it to handle some level of information effectively. And however “lowly,” if the job wasn’t important, it wouldn’t exist. <CLICK> Superior performers have personalities that allow them to be comfortable in the environment of the position – interacting effectively with their colleagues and clients – and meeting the challenges of the position, head on. <CLICK> Finally, superior performers tend to be people who are interested in the work they do – and because they are interested, because they get something from the work, they are much more motivated to be successful. They want to do the job well. <CLICK>