Some Truths About Team Management

Traditional management literature has it that team performance tends to follow a bell curve distribution, with the majority of the team being mid-range, a few at the low end and a few up at the high end. That is, most of your colleagues are likely to not deviate too far from the mean (being fairly good performers), with a minority being at each tail end (a few exceptionally good performers and a few exceptionally bad performers).

There is some degree of accuracy in the bell curve statistics, but a higher resolution analysis reveals the distribution to more closely follow a power law, with much greater variation, where a small number of team members are extraordinarily high performers, a large number are fairly good performers, and a small minority are very poor performers. Here the mean becomes less important, because the extraordinarily high performers are disproportionately more influential in the team (or company) than the rest combined.

This phenomenon is closely related to Price’s law, which states that around 50% of some kind of human output comes from the square root of the total amount of human output. In a typical company, 50% of the work (where work = creative influence) is done by the square root of the total number of people in the company. If your company has 10 people, about 3 of them are probably responsible for 50% of the output; if your company has 10,000 employees, then about 100 of them are going to be about half as influential as the rest of the workforce combined.

The difference between a normal distribution and a power law distribution is usually related to the underlying engine of the system in terms of dynamics. For example, normal distributions have constraints that impede very rapid growth over a short space of time, whereas power laws do not have the same impediments. In team management, this accentuates the advantage of having a few hyper performers – they are the ones who will be disproportionately more influential and beneficial to your operation, and they are the ones on whom you as a manger should divert most of your attention.

Unfortunately, the industry model and societal ethos is geared towards the opposite approach (especially in the public sector), where a disproportionate amount of time and resources are spent on under-achievers and people performing badly, while many of the top performers are given too little attention or regard for their contributions and achievements. The excessive time and resources spent on the under-achievers incurs opportunity costs in the shape of valuable time not being spent on your hyper-achievers. Remember, your under-achievers are holding back your team far more than they are advancing it. You should do just enough to stop them holding back progress, and focus more of your attention on the most valuable contributors.

And if your under-achievers still can’t thrive after being given several chances, you should adopt the ‘fail it fast’ method and terminate their contract. Don’t allow them to remain in post a day longer than they ought to be. There are many good reasons why, but here are the two best. The first is that your under-performers are taking up valuable places in your team that could be occupied by hyper-performers. The second is that it’s actually not good for your under-performers to be in roles in which they are not thriving. In other words, it’s better for them (as well as everyone else) if they are moved on to a role in which they can thrive, because they will be more content and more productive, and your remaining team members will be much better off too.