Hi, my name is Mark Mitford. I spent 20 plus years working as a high level HR executive in corporate America with many fortune five hundreds and several middle market sized companies. If you're a small business owner is CEO or any other professional, given the task of solving your company's HR issues, then you're in the right place today. We're going to be talking about your talent pool. And first of all, you may say, well, mark, what does HR have to do with a pool?
Well, when you think about it, your talent pool is your entire workforce and your entire employee workforce. And when you look at your employee workforce, so let's say for a simple illustration purposes, you have a hundred employees working for your company. You have got a handful, probably 15 or 20, maybe 25 who are considered your top performers. And on the flip side, guess what? You've got probably 10 Or 15 employees who are really not that great, who were lower performers.
And you've got that everybody else left over in the middle. So you've got probably 50 to 60% of your employees who are those steady, steady state employees. They do a good job. They're successful. They're doing a good job for your company. They come in and they , they earn their paycheck every day.
But I really wanted to focus on today from a talent pool perspective is making sure you clearly understand if you're a business leader, you need to clearly understand who is your top talent and who is your bottom talent, and you may ask, well, why do I need to understand that? And it's kind of interesting because a lot of clients we work with when we talk about talent, talent, pool, talent management, and things like that.
And we asked them the question, do you know who your top performers are within your organization? And then the top talent you need to retain within your organization. And they will typically say in a lot of cases, I don't really have a clue. And then guess what? On the flip side, if we ask them about their bottom talent, they'll probably give us the same response. The kind of give us this dumbfounded look, and I'm not sure I know we have a handful of them, but I'm not sure who they are.
One of the key things you need to do from a company perspective is making sure you clearly understand who your top talent is first and foremost is your top people. They actually in several, under several studies have been done by a number of leading magazines, a Harvard business review, Forbes magazine, Inc magazine, and so on. That will clearly state exactly the same thing. Your top performers, Your handful of top performers are the crown jewels and your organization.
You have to do everything you can to retain those individuals. They will typically outperform your bottom performing employees by three, sometimes even 500%. So again, that's an amazing statistic, but a lot of times when you look at it again, these people are just having more pure output, but they're actually being able to come up with creative and innovative ways to solve problems.
And they're the people you would, you would task with the toughest challenges in your business because you know, if they can't do it in your business and they can't sell the problem, then probably nobody can. The key thing also, that's really important around your top people is first of all, of course identify them. The other key thing is really understand what motivates them. What is their key driver? Because most people, and again, my career has been over 25 years in HR.
So I've seen hundreds of these individuals and the common denominator is that most of them want to continue to be challenged. They do not like the status quo and they do not like to be in the same job for a year, 2, 3, 4 years. They don't want that. They want to continue to take on their next opportunity, the next challenge.
And typically they're the ones who are going to be, you know, the more challenging give me the better, because they're just the type who, who really are excited and they get kind of a, kind of a high off of having that kind of a situation. So that's the key thing from it, from your top talent, of course, you've got to make sure you also pay them competitively. You're paying them top dollar to be there. And you're also looking at where do they want to go in their career?
Because if you don't talk to them about their career development, very openly, there's a good chance that they will become bored and they will feel like they're getting stagnant. And then there's a much greater chance. They, if they can't find the opportunity for the next challenge internally, guess what? They're actually going to go. We'll look for opportunities externally and join another company. So that's the key thing there.
The other thing we're going to talk about for a few minutes is your lower performance . And again, every company has them and lower performers. Unfortunately, they take a variety, they look , uh, they, they look , um, in all different shapes sizes and so on. Um, so that's the key thing. Sometimes they're really hard to identify because they look busy and they do a lot of activity, but then they don't actually produce anything material for you.
The other thing you run into with your , a lower , um , uh , a lower performer within your organization, you may end up in a situation to where these people, it could be as blatant and , and easy to solve as an absence issue. But in some cases they're actually producing products or producing output. That's poor quality.
If they're client facing , they may be upsetting clients that they're working with, or customers that they're working with to the point where the customer decides to move their business to one of your competitors. And the other thing is that typically most employees know who these people are. And so what happens there is that your low performers, they actually lower the bar of performance and engagement for your entire workforce.
Especially if it looks like the low performers are not being dealt with in a proactive way by their managers. And that's going to be a topic for another podcast where we get into disciplinary action and how to be proactive about that. But the key thing is that your lower performers, and a lot of times they may just not, it could be a situation where they've never been given feedback as to what they're doing wrong.
So first and foremost, make sure you give them specific feedback as to what they're doing wrong so they can try to correct the situation. Because if you wait weeks and months or longer, I guarantee you, they're not going to fix themselves because you got to give them very, very specific feedback as to what exactly is going wrong.
And then you've gotta be able to try to coach them up, or you may have to look at managing them out, but if you end up unfortunately managing them out of the organization, and guess what, there's a much better chance you can end up with taking maybe a C or D player within your workforce and actually finding an ARB player to replace them.
And even in that organizations, we mentioned a few minutes ago, if you have a a hundred person organization and you have even 10 low-performers within your company, it's almost like, you know, having a boat and you're trying to run the boat. When you have the anchor in the water. It guess what the boat is not going to work that well. And the boat may get stuck on a big rock.
So you've got to really be focused on doing everything you can to continually manage your talent pool, take care of your top performers, continue to challenge your performers, continue to look for asking them clearly, where do they want to go within the organization and do everything you can to try to fulfill their needs and on your lower performers, get in front of it, coach them and be proactive around coaching them.
And then if , uh , you need to, then you can focus on putting them on some sort of a progressive corrective corrective action plan or disciplinary plan. And then unfortunately, if you do have to terminate them, which is the reality of every business owner, sometimes that does happen. Then you can look at an opportunity to upgrade that position and moving from a C or D player to perhaps an a or B player. And if you do that continuous, continuously within your organization, guess what?
You're going to continue to raise that performance bar. You're going to have a higher level of engagement, a higher level of productivity, And ultimately you're going to have greater financial success. Well, I guess that covers it for today. Thanks for listening. For more information on all things pertaining to HR, visit us at hrcatalystconsulting.com, and don't forget to like us and subscribe to our podcast until next time. This is Mark Mitford . Thanks for listening. Take care.