The Four Quadrants of Employee Performance - by Daniel Stillman - Sep, 2023 - Medium
The Four Quadrants of Employee Performance - by Daniel Stillman - Sep, 2023 - Medium
The Four Quadrants of Employee Performance - by Daniel Stillman - Sep, 2023 - Medium
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Hiring, retaining and developing talent is a key leadership skill. Without great talent
it’s impossible to have a great team. And without a great team, it’s impossible to build a
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great organization.
Hiring, retaining and developing talent is also time consuming, both in amount of time
daily and weekly and length of time, over months.
The HBR classic The First 90 Days (summarized here) has a diagram that explains that a
new hire can actually take 3 months to start delivering value and another 3 months to
start to see a breakeven return on your investment.
The space under the line to the lower left is “value consumed” as a hire learns about
the organization and the job. There’s no net contribution to be expected until three
months in (90 days) — that’s one of the main reasons that new hires should read The
First 90 Days, and use it to develop a plan to manage expectations of their employers —
which are always high!
You, as a Leader, are understandably itchy to hire employees that can “hit the ground
running” on day one…but that’s rarely a realistic expectation.
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Does that mean you have to wait for 3–6 months to find out if you’ve made a good hire?
He wrote one of my favorite business books, Setting the Table. Read it!
Danny recently shared one of his most impactful leadership frameworks with Tim
Ferris and summarized it here. The core idea is that there are four essential types of
employees with four different attitudes towards performance. For each, you can have
an action point and a time frame when you start to discover what kind of employee
they are.
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“If you’ve got somebody who can and will, I want to celebrate that person. Those are my
flowers. I really want to water them.”
It’s easy for leaders to take the Can/Will employees for granted. But it’s important to
“water these flowers” with praise and recognition. This helps with retention, sure, but
it also makes it clear what kind of culture you want to cultivate. More on that later.
“If you have someone who can’t but will, I’m gonna coach them. The wick on my candle is
pretty long for someone who will…If you can teach them how to do the thing, they’ve got the
right hospitality attitude. Once they learn …you’re going to have a loyal employee for life.”
What’s amazing here is that Meyer goes on to say that he has a “six month wick” for
these folks (just like HBR suggests!) …and refers to these employees as gems.
Employees that have the right mindset but not the skillset are diamonds in the rough.
Many things are teachable. Hospitality, in Meyer’s view, is something that is easier to
hire for than to coach.
Coaching is a crucial skill for leaders, and one that is rarely taught. Cultivating a
coaching leadership style is one of the key pillars of conversational leadership. You can
check out a summary of my core coaching frameworks for leaders here.
“Someone who can’t and won’t, I’m going to put the candle underneath their rear end, and
they’re going to have to learn that this isn’t working, because the longer that person stays…
everyone else on the team says, “why should I try?”
I’ve seen this play out firsthand in my executive coaching practice. A client of mine
made a significant hire and found that this person lacked some crucial skills and
essential attitudes that got missed in the hiring process. At the two month mark, we
agreed that they would light a candle under that hire. That conversation cleared a
pathway to letting the hire go at the three month mark if there wasn’t radical
improvement. The frustration and disappointment my client worked through in the
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first two months was alleviated by clear communication of expectations and goals, and
it made the process of letting the hire go a month later much more smooth and regret-
free.
“The hardest one I find is the can but won’t, that’s the person that you can say to them
“You’re way better than this, but for some reason, you’re just choosing not to bring it here.”
Meyer’s four quadrants, key action points and time windows are summed up here:
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Meyers believes that employees will notice when you, as a leader, tolerate the
Can/Won’t and the Can’t/Won’t folks, thinking to themselves:
“Why do they keep batting that person in the lineup instead of benching them or sending
them to the minor leagues!?”
The way to scale culture is, in short, watering your flowers assiduously and lighting
candles intentionally under your potential puzzle pieces.
Easy, right?!
Meyer’s culture equation points out the cost of doing nothing — it’s impossible to scale
the culture you want to create if you let your underperforming employees sap the
energy of your flowers and gems.
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Watering Flowers and letting Puzzle pieces go isn’t quite enough. Your highest ROI
employees are actually the gems — Can’t/Will folks who need more support and
coaching to unlock their potential.
If we can foster a coaching mindset for ourselves and our teams, we can always turn
Can’t into Can with a calm, consistent Will.
If you want to hone your skills as a coaching leader, check out my essay here. If you
want a coach for yourself, check out my coaching page here and see if I might be a
good fit for your needs.
Follow
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Daniel Stillman
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