If you supervise employees, do a quick tally in your head: Which employee do you tend to spend the most time with?

Is it that employee who comes in on time, words hard, has strong customer service skills, takes good care of equipment and it trustworthy? Or do you find yourself spending more time with the employee who is not performing the way you would like?

In working with thousands of people in supervisory roles over the years, I learned that most bosses spend more time with those individuals who are not performing well. 

We’re not talking about trainees. I mean the employee who may not arrive when they are supposed to, does not have the best customer service skills, does not take the best care of equipment, does not do well with many co-workers and is not easy to supervise.

These low performers suck the life out of bosses at work. Supervisors want people to do well. They want people to be successful. All too often, when a person is not successful, a supervisor may even blame themselves for the person’s performance. If only I had spent more time with them, etc. Addressing such performance issues is important, but my tips today focus on what a leader can do to make their days better and move the performance of themselves and of others.

I sat down with a new leader of an organization recently. The person was relatively new in the supervisory role in addition to carrying his own individual workload. He shared that taking the time to supervise people was hurting his own productivity.

I asked how many of the 15 are solid performers. The answer was 12. The other three were middle to low performers. This means these three people have done well in certain parts of their job, a good job in many, yet in a few areas they are not performing well. As a supervisor, be careful how you look describe such individuals. It is not unusual for a supervisor to share concerns they have about an employee, but first starting our saying “they are a high performer.” They use the term “high performer” based on performing well in specific areas.

This leader realized he had spent months trying to move the three upward, and all the while, lost out on his own productivity. What do you do? My suggestion was for the supervisor to meet with the 12 that do both jobs well — those who are high performers — thank them and re-recruit them.

Pay lots of attention to the 12 who are doing it well. Highlight them. Make it obvious. For example, when one of those high performing 12 do something that helps drive results in the role, send a note to all 15, sharing the positive results. What gets rewarded and recognized gets repeated. My experience is that over the next 90 days, as the three struggling employees see their coworkers getting recognized for behavior and results they are not displaying, some of those three will begin to align the behaviors that the supervisor has been trying to get.

This week at one of the Studer Community Institute roundtables, I demonstrated how a leader can do this.

Let’s say I am a manager in a restaurant. The goal is to have the servers ask each person if they found on the menu what they were looking for. And if not, what would they like to see. Let’s say there are four servers working that shift. As the manager, I went to each table and in my conversation, I asked if the server had asked the menu question.

Three of the four servers had done so, but one has not. What do I do? When I go into the kitchen, all four servers are there. I thank the three servers who are doing the desired behavior. I don’t thank the fourth.  In my role-play, I then ask the server I did not recognize how long will it take them to start doing the recognized behavior. The answer is always right away.

The main message is one of the best ways to get someone who is not doing the desired behavior is to complement those that are in a way the person notices. After a while, if the people not doing what is needed are still not grasping it, it is time to go to the next step with them.

Here is the good news. As a leader, spending time with those people doing the job is fun. These people are pleased with the attention and the supervisory job is more enjoyable and productive. You’ll also be pivoting your time, and the attitude you carry home with you toward the people who are helping you the most.