3 mistakes managers make when developing employees
Manager discussing a performance review with their employee.
Managers without formal education or training in human resources or performance management often fail to perform one of the essential functions of management correctly: developing their employees. Among the mistakes we see managers make when working on developing their employees, there are three that stand out we see repeatedly. Here they are:
1. Focusing on employees who are not currently meeting standard performance expectations
It's understandable, tempting—that managers want to focus their attention on employees who are struggling to meet performance standards. However, this can lead to overlooking the development needs of high-performing employees. All employees, regardless of their current performance level, can benefit from development opportunities. However, there is an entire body of research showing that there is a greater return on investment in developing your already performing employees into exemplary performers than spending too much time and resources on non-performers.
2. Developing too many skills at a time
It's tempting to try to develop employees in as many areas as possible. However, this can be counterproductive. Employees need time to master new skills. Trying to learn too many things at once can lead to overwhelm and burnout. Additionally, by attempting to develop too many skills at a time, you lose the ability over time to isolate which skill development intervention made the greatest impact on the employee’s performance. This makes data collection difficult, and clouds the potential to learn so that you can apply the particular intervention to the performance of their employees with similar expandable strengths or skills.
3. Selecting an intervention that is not correlated to the performance driver most responsible for an employee not performing at an exemplary level
Before developing an employee, it's important to first identify the root cause of their current performance level as opposed to what exemplary performance would look like. The goal of any performance development effort is then to close this gap between current and exemplary levels of performance by tweaking and intervening on one of the seven performance drivers. Only after you know the reasons behind an employee’s current level of performance can you select an intervention that works on improving the performance driver that is associated with their current levels. What we see happening many times is managers jumping to conclusions about what will "fix" or "improve" an employee’s performance and rushing to apply an intervention that is not appropriate to improve the influence of the performance driver most responsible for the current performance level. This is akin to using a screwdriver when really what you needed to use was a hammer. It is both lazy and sloppy on the part of the manager to jump to these conclusions without first conducting a proper performance analysis.
If you would like to learn and implement a proven model for developing employee performance, maybe it’s time we had a chat. Let's talk.
