News Release (WASHINGTON, D.C.) — According to a new study by Leadership IQ, 87% of employees say that working with a low performer has made them want to change jobs. 93% of employees say that working with a low performer has decreased their productivity. But only 14% of senior executives say their company effectively manages low performers. And only 17% of middle managers say they feel comfortable improving or removing low performers.
Leadership IQ, a leadership training and research company, compiled these results after conducting employee surveys with 70,305 employees, managers and executives from 116 public, private, business and healthcare organizations. Leadership IQ’s employee survey asks 45 questions about such workforce issues as employee loyalty, corporate strategy, and leadership effectiveness.
What makes someone a low performer? In follow-up questionnaires, 6,241 employees were asked to list five characteristics that defined a low performer. The top five responses were as follows, in order of importance:
• Negative attitude
• Stirs-up trouble
• Blames others
• Lacks initiative
• Incompetence
“Low performers can feel like emotional vampires, sucking the energy out of everyone around them,” explains Mark Murphy, CEO of Leadership IQ. “It’s one of the great management misnomers that low performers’ major problem is technical incompetence. While some lack skills, most low performers are so identified because of a difficult attitude.”
“While it may strike some leaders as paradoxical, leaders may have to remove their worst employees in order to keep their best employees,” he notes. “When the overwhelming majority of employees say that working with low performers makes them want to quit their jobs, leaders should accept this as a ‘wake-up call’ and tackle this issue immediately. Because if low performers start dictating the company’s culture, productivity, quality and service will all decline precipitously, and high performers will avoid your company like the plague.”
“Given that only 14% of senior executives think their company addresses this issue effectively, there’s tremendous competitive advantage for companies that can turn this around” adds Murphy. “But companies need to begin by investing much more time and energy training their managers how to solve this problem if they hope to be successful.”
“Trying to run an organization without tackling the low performer problem is akin to building a house with shoddy materials. No matter how skilled the labor, the structure is going to collapse.”