Question:  Why don’t we see as many employees exhibiting excellence as we’d like – we know that many more employees are capable of it than actually display it?

Answer:  Firstly, experience in Legitimate Leadership groups shows that only a minority of managers actually normally set out their expectations of employees. And even if they do, an even smaller minority of managers actually hold employees to account for those expectations.

This is even though, in our experience, groups of managers generally have no difficulty, when asked, in articulating a comprehensive list of behaviours and qualities that would indicate a person achieving excellence in a role – meaning they have a very clear picture in their heads of what this thing called excellence looks like.

So firstly, managers should actually do this! I believe that in not doing this, managers generally miss a crucial opportunity to enable their staff to strive for excellence in their jobs.

The Legitimate Leadership Model holds that a key enabler of employee contribution is ensuring standards and expectations are clear to employees.

Even when managers do actually do this, two problems often crop up:

1. Excellence is described as a result, instead of being specific about what the employee should contribute toward that result. Expectations are often specified in performance agreements as ‘results to be achieved’ – such as % productivity, sales volumes, order fill rates, etc. Over-achievement of results is always a product of things employees do consistently well. Managers don’t articulate frequently enough, or clearly enough, the things that employees should do.
2. Excellence is reduced to a performance rating description. The problem with this approach is that it does not actually tell the average employee what he needs to do to be seen to be achieving excellence. The description on a rating scale (1-5) doesn’t tell you anything. ‘Exceeds expectations’ is meaningless unless the manager is descriptively specific about what ‘Exceeds Expectations’ actually looks like at the level of behaviour. Further, I find performance agreements are often geared toward specifying the minimum standard, but don’t talk enough about how to exceed it.

If employees don’t have a clear picture of what excellence looks like, achievement of it will be accidental. The average employee absolutely cannot strive for excellence if she does not have a crystal-clear picture of what it looks like.

So while most managers have this picture clear in their own heads, they fail to place that same picture in the heads of their employees.

The fix is simple: regular conversations with your employees about what your picture of excellence looks like, and what help and type of support they require from you in order to strive for it.