Episode 111

In the previous episode of our leadership dilemmas series, we discussed shielding your team from all the proverbial monsters — all the toxicity, difficult news, and noise — and being fully transparent and how those two impact the team’s morale. Today, we will be wondering where it’s best to focus your time and energy as a leader. Namely, on your best people — the stars — or on your worst people — the dead wood.

Stars and Dead Wood

You don’t always control what people you must take care of as a leader. Some companies involve team leaders in the recruitment process, but not all of them. Sometimes the process is more centralized. This might be especially true for companies that do services for other organizations and not their own products. Even if you do have that luxury, it’s really difficult to judge anyone based on a recruitment process, even an elaborate one. Usually, you have to actually work with someone for at least a few weeks to see what they are really capable of.

Maybe they are going to be the stars in your team being excellent at what they do. Or maybe, they turn out to be great at interviews, but incompetent, toxic or both in actual everyday work – colloquially known as the dead wood.

The Intuition

So, on whom should we spend the most energy as a leader? Our best people are often impeccably autonomous, and proactive, and they can handle themselves perfectly well. They don’t generate noise, alarms, escalations and complaints. On the other hand, a lot is happening on the opposite of this scale. Other people come to you to complain about the dead wood, stuff is not working, deadlines are missed, and sometimes there is a fire or a big bang in production systems. Then there are lengthy evaluations, difficult talks, feedback, maybe detailed improvement plans, dramas, ultimatums and perhaps finally a layoff. A lot of effort is required to handle all that.

The Square Root Law

Price’s law, also known as the square root law, states that in an organization, a number of people roughly equal to the square root of the total size of the organization are doing half the work. If you have a 100 people organization, 10 of them will be doing half the work. If you have 10 000 people – just 100 of them will be doing half the work.

The talent, creativity and motivation are not equally distributed and if you put employees on a “scale”, it turns out that, statistically, you will have a small number of very impactful people and a trailing edge of those who are underperforming a lot. Originally, the law was formulated in regards to the distribution of a number of scientific papers published by academics but was later extrapolated.

The Balance

So now, imagine how much you could gain, if you shift even just a little bit of your attention from the dead wood onto the stars. Chances are that this time would be wasted anyway in many cases, on the other hand, the time invested in top performers is most often the best investment you can make.  Of course, it doesn’t mean you should micromanage or control them. Just make sure they are happy, that they have everything they need to continue, and remove all possible obstacles from their way, even the tiniest frictions if possible. On the other hand, this doesn’t mean you should abandon problematic people. In the end, you often need to fix or address problems that arise.

Also, people deserve second chances or third chances. Before you deem someone a dead wood, you need time to discover what’s really happening – maybe someone is underperforming because of health, personal issues, changing dynamics in the team or something else. There might be many layers to uncover and jumping to conclusions too quickly might be harmful. But at some point, you have to stop and often make difficult decisions.