Are you tolerating underperformance in your workplace?

Are you tolerating underperformance in your workplace?

Hi everyone, Angus Pryor here Australia’s number one Google-ranked and or marketer. Now this morning, I’m reading a book called No Rules Rules, which is a book about the development of Netflix and in particular culture and like these two lemons that I’ve just shown you, not a very good one and a very good one. The impact of underperformance on other team members is extraordinary. Now, while this is a book about it’s an American book, they quoted a study from Australia from the University of New South Wales. And basically, what they did is they inserted they had groups of four university students, and they inserted actors into some of the groups and one of the actors their role was to be a slacker. One of the roles they call this person a jerk. I suspect we’d have a different word for that. And basically, and then they had some other sort of, what do they call those groups where it’s like it’s the normal group. So, a 45-minute exercise they had to do. What they found is consistently in dozens of trials conducted over a month-long period, groups with one underperformer did worse than other teams by 30 to 40%. Just one underperformer. You know, sometimes as a manager, it’s tempting to go oh you know, I’m too busy managing that underperformance. But that’s a study that very clearly shows that the whole team’s performance can be dragged down by 30 or 40%. And indeed, in the book, that’s what they found about Netflix when they got rid of the bottom 30% or whatever it was of their people. Their performance skyrocketed as a result of that. So, a simple but a hard question. Are you tolerating underperformance in your workplace?

See you next time.