Some people grow your business. Some people quietly hold it back. And if you are too busy firefighting to know who is who, then your team will limit the growth of your business.

Not All People Problems Are the Same

You can’t deal with all of your people problems in the same way. Some people need recognition, some people need development, some people need confronting, and some people need to leave your business. The question is: what is it that you need to help elevate the performance of your business, to build a truly high-performance team for your company, to free you up, and to enable your business to achieve its full potential?

At Marco Soares, we work with business owners to answer exactly that question.

The Four-Quadrant Team Performance Matrix

This is a very useful tool that I use with my clients. It helps clients put team members in one of four quadrants to help them understand what the most appropriate way forward is with each team member. We’ve got attitude along the side and skill along the bottom.

Stars: High Attitude, High Skill

People with high attitude and high skill are your stars. They demonstrate all of the right behaviours, they have high standards, and they achieve the outcomes that you need consistently. These are the people that you really want to retain in your business, because they will help you grow your business and take it to the next level.

What I often find is that with the stars, they are left to their own devices. The real opportunity cost is that these people need development and stretching, they’ve got so much more to give if you give them the right time and attention and help them understand what their career path looks like in your business. Often that is completely neglected, and sometimes those stars go and find that opportunity, that challenge, that next step in somebody else’s business.

Risers: High Attitude, Low Skill

Risers are high on attitude. They’ve got the right behaviours and the right standards, but they are low on skill, they aren’t ready yet. With these people, the right course of action is to make sure that you put enough time into their development, their coaching, and their training, because these are the stars of the future.

The challenge with the risers is that often they aren’t given the right attention, so they’re left to drift. Sometimes they will leave your business to go and find the development and the opportunity elsewhere.

One of the key challenges I find with risers is that mishires happen when you put somebody into a role where you need immediate results or a certain level of performance in the short term, but you put a riser in because you might be trying to save money, or because you don’t have a robust recruiting process. That person then fails in that role, not because they are a bad person or not competent, but because you put them into a seat that they did not have the skills and experience for. That is a hiring mistake.

So with your risers, you want to develop and stretch them, and you want to make sure that you are realistic about what outcomes you need from specific roles in your business so that you don’t mishire.

Drains: Low Attitude, Low Skill

Low on attitude and low on skill, these are your drains. These are the people that don’t demonstrate any of the right behaviours and they don’t achieve the results. They drain management time and they drain energy. You probably know an energy vampire, they’re the most common kind of vampire. These are the people that you’ve been tolerating for years, and you know that they aren’t the right fit for your business.

So many businesses allow the drains to take all of the bandwidth. The real opportunity cost is that you could have a riser or a star sitting on that seat, doing that job properly, instead of wasting management time and not producing results. If you’re serious about building a high-performance culture, you cannot afford to keep tolerating the drains.

Disruptors: Low Attitude, High Skill

Low on attitude, high on skill, these are your disruptors. These are the people that are performing technically, but they aren’t the right culture fits and they don’t have the right attitude.

Now, sometimes that’s down to you not sitting down with that person and helping them understand that there are two parts to every job. Yes, there’s the technical output, but there’s also the attitude piece, because you’re part of a team. If you don’t help people understand that attitude is as important as skill, then these people will remain in the organisation.

The real challenge with that is people notice. Your team members will notice that you are tolerating poor attitude because this person is producing the results, and that does have an impact on the business.

Not all people are necessarily bad in this disruptor space. Sometimes they might be on the wrong seat. Sometimes they might be disengaged because you haven’t managed them properly. But sometimes they may not be the right fit for the business, and if that’s the case, you do need to face up to it.

Where Is Your Management Time Actually Going?

By taking this matrix and plotting your various team members on it, you can take action and understand what you need to do to improve the overall performance of your team, and what you need to do on an individual basis to shift team members in the right direction.

The challenge that I see in many, many businesses is that all of the management time is stuck at the bottom, dealing with the drains and the disruptors. As a result, the risers don’t get the attention that they need and deserve, and the stars don’t get the development, the stretch, and the recognition that they need. Your business slowly starts to drift, the overall performance of the team isn’t right, and then you have to jump in and do things that other people should be doing.

This is one of the most common patterns I explore in the Mind Your Own Business series, understanding where the real bottlenecks in your business lie, and taking decisive action to address them.

Your Challenge: Plot Your Team on the Matrix

Take this matrix and plot out your team members. Put all of the various names across the business across all of these boxes, and ask yourself this very important question: where is your management time and energy going? Is it going into the people at the top, or is it going into the people at the bottom?

You need to be completely honest with yourself when you do this exercise, because this is a key unlock to building a proper high-performance team that can free you up to build your business and do strategic work. If you’d like to see this framework in action, you can also watch it on the Mind Your Own Business YouTube channel.

Take Ownership of Your Team

You need to take ownership of your team members. Team members aren’t going to judge your leadership by the things that you say — they are going to judge your leadership ability by the things that you tolerate, what you let slide, and what you ignore.

Don’t ignore your people problems. Deal with them head on, using a fabulous tool like this.

See you next time on Mind Your Own Business.