Strategy #27: Spend most of your time with your best people

The natural tendency for most managers is to work with people who most need the help, or who most need extra supervision, assuming that the most highly effective and productive people are already doing pretty well on their own. But everyone loves attention, even the best people (perhaps especially the best people).

One of the best loyalty strategies is to spend most of your time with your best people. This is where you will find the greatest leverage for each hour that you invest. But don’t just take my word for it. That’s also the advice of Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, and also of Andrew Grove, chairman of Intel. They both state that the highest leverage activity for any manager is encouraging their top performers to even higher levels of performance and accomplishment, not in trying to bring the laggards up to marginally acceptable levels.

Try this:  For the next month, track every minute that you spend with your people. How much of that time is spent encouraging your top performers, and how much of it is spent coaching (or nagging) your laggards? How can you move laggard time into top performer time?

“In my years of research on human achievement and accomplishment, one of the most striking things I’ve learned is that a high expectation of success is the single most valuable quality you can bring into any challenging situation. A high expectation of success is more important than natural ability or the lack thereof.  It’s more important than practice or preparation. This has been proven in any number of controlled experiments.”

Denis Waitley: The New Dynamics of Winning

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