One of my mentors from early in my career once told me, “We hire really talented people and then proceed to kill them from the neck up.” I laughed at the time, because this seemed like a preposterous thought. Many years and hundreds of clients later, I have come to realize the truth of that statement.
Obviously, most business owners or managers don’t consciously limit the performance of their employees. Ask anybody that has left a job, however, and odds are they left because they were disappointed in some way with their manager/supervisor or with the work environment. So, here are 5 ways (there are many more) that managers and business owners may be limiting the performance of their employees:
- Being unhappy with the performance of an employee, but not telling them. Employees can sense when a manager/owner is upset. Not telling the employee what your expectations are will certainly lead to poorer performance.
- Changing priorities. Nothing confuses or frustrates employees more than being assigned project A one day, and then told to stop that project and do something else the next day. If this happens repeatedly, the employee will naturally approach new projects with less enthusiasm than you might hope for.
- Not providing tools, systems or resources for them to do the job. This can show up in unexpected ways. For example, the computer system that is constantly down, or a printer that is a long distance from their desk, or creating policies or procedures that make it take much longer to do a critical task than it should, creating “busy work” that does not contribute to business results. All of these make it more difficult to perform at optimum levels.
- Top performers receive the same performance evaluation as under-performers. Employees talk with each other; they know how each other’s review went, and they share how much of a raise they got – even if you ask them not to. Rewarding unequal performance in the same way can be demotivating.
- Promoting an employee to a management position before they are ready. It is hard to deny top performers a promotion when the opportunity arises. Unfortunately, being a top performer in a position does not necessarily qualify them to supervise others in that position. It is essential that people are promoted to supervisory positions only when they possess these skills in addition to mastery of their current position. To do otherwise is a disservice to both them and those they will be supervising. Performance of every employee connected with this promotion can suffer when this occurs.
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As you can see, each of these items can negatively impact performance, and each of these limiting factors are an unintended result of a management/ownership action. The good news is that all of these are easy to correct. Talk candidly with your employees. You might be surprised how many simple changes can be made to improve their performance – and they will tell you if you ask!
Share with us the kinds of things that have happened on the job that have been demotivating to you…
