There is a wonderful Chinese proverb that goes, quite simply:
If you take a sick fish out of a pond, clean it up and then put it back in the same water, it will get sick again!
This is such a great analogy for some of the organisations we have worked with recently, who are going through a period of “cleansing” in their businesses. Typically, we find many of these organisations mapping out their least performing employees and then initiating a process of performance management to, what they hope, remove them from the business so they can be replaced with someone new and presumably better.
This is wrong from two angles:
Firstly, the process of performance management should be used as a tool to guide employees back into a business, to help them achieve their true potential, not as a way to push them out. Turning around an underperforming employee is potentially one of the most rewarding and cost-saving things a manager could do in a business … and yet very rarely happens.
Secondly, as the proverb suggests, taking an underperforming employee out of a business that in itself is “dysfunctional” does not solve the problem – it merely delays the problem or disguises it as an employee issue. Pushing someone out of an “ill” organisation and replacing them with someone else is both costly and pointless as ultimately that new person will soon suffer the same fate.
Performance management, therefore, must start with the business itself, before turning onto the people within that business. Look at the management team, the processes in place, the vision, values and mission of the organisation and ensure that your “pond” is clean and healthy before filling it with new fish!
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