One of the first things Jill Geisler heard from her journalism management mentor was that mediocrity is a curse. “You’re too kind to fire it,” he told her, “and you don’t dare promote it.” After thirty years in leadership, Geisler knows that mediocrity is a universal challenge for managers trying to assess and improve the performance of a team. There are always some team members who have to be described as uninspired, formulaic and lacklustre. In other words, they’re average – not awful, but never great.
In better times, average employees weren’t necessarily a major challenge as long as they stayed out of trouble. Their managers could focus on genuine underperformers and daily organizational brush fires. But not in these tough times, Geisler warns. “Managers are being asked to justify every position on the team and expect them not only to perform well, but often to add new duties.”
Start by looking at yourself
Fighting mediocrity begins with making certain that managers aren’t contributing to it themselves. Here are some questions that will help you discern whether you’ve created or deepened the problem.
- Have I been clear with this person about roles and responsibilities?
- Have I communicated our standards of quality and how they are measured?
- Have I provided regular performance feedback?
- Have I avoided tough conversations with this person, and instead settled for “workarounds” of his or her performance?
- Have I provided training to help fill gaps in this person’s skill set?
- Have I enlisted the help of managers or peers to help this person improve?
- Have I communicated the urgency of the need for better performance?
- Have I discussed the potential consequences of continued mediocre performance?
- Are there ways this person is contributing that I haven’t taken into account?
- Might this person have skills that I haven’t fully identified?
I’ve done all that. What next?
Limited budgets in the nonprofit sector too often mean a lack of training, and even a lack of time for adequate managerial feedback. That creates what Geisler calls workarounds – offloading some of the person’s work to another or crafting schedules and assignments that minimize the impact of a mediocre staffer’s shortcomings. And it won’t be long before employees who are working harder than ever notice that they’re picking up that person’s slack.
In the end, says Geisler, after you’ve answered those questions, you may have to ask yourself a few more. What’s your responsibility for the mediocrity and what can you do about it? If you’ve diligently tried to help the person grow, and it hasn’t worked, ask yourself one more tough question: Knowing what you know now, would you hire this person if he or she applied for a job today? If you can’t say yes, you know it’s time to stop accommodating mediocrity.
