A recent Wall Street Journal article captures an emerging trend concerning a key management challenge: people. Executives are reviewing their strategies regarding team size, deployment, and overall employee contributions to the organization. Companies like Walmart, JPMorgan, Meta, and others are curbing new hires despite aggressive plans for growth. There is more to this than the impact of AI. As one senior executive said, “If people are getting more productive, you don’t need to hire more people.”

Productivity and getting things done are essential for organizational and individual career success. The current processes for recruiting, hiring, onboarding, deploying, monitoring, evaluating, and developing personnel could benefit from review and improvement. This is not reserved for organizations of a specific size, industry, or ownership structure. It is rampant, leaving business owners and senior executives frustrated and bewildered. This is not an “HR” issue but a matter for senior leadership. What to do?

Performance standards slip when sub-par performance is tolerated. This is also true for behavior. Even individuals with high personal standards can lose enthusiasm when they see less than acceptable performance accepted without corrective action being taken. The cause of this has many facets. The most glaring is a lack of supervisory and managerial ability, willingness, and skill.

It is commonplace for team members to be promoted to managerial and supervisory positions with little or no training or skill development in leadership responsibility. This manifests itself in managers and supervisors who are ill equipped and unprepared for these crucial roles. The impact organization-wide can seem subtle but is no less dramatic and impactful. Because they aren’t sure how to deal with poor performers, unskilled managers give it perfunctory effort or, more likely, ignore it all together. In doing this, they create and communicate a new standard: the bar has been lowered and everyone sees it. “C” level players are relieved (they now have a safe place to “hide”), “B” players shrug and convince themselves that they are largely unaffected, while “A” players plan their exit.

Raising the level of performance and productivity is not easy but it is achievable. Leadership organizations understand this and plan their processes and systems around this. Development of their key people is a natural place to start. Professional development resources are available (check out gcleadershipinstitute.com).

For more information, visit my website at ajstrategy.com or contact me at joe@ajstrategy.com.