I want to share something I learned today from the book “The Making of a Manager” by Julie Zhou, which is how to diagnose the lack of great work from an employee.
The real question we are really asking: what is preventing a report from doing great work?
There are two main reasons for this:
- Lack of skills: the employee doesn’t have the necessary skills & experience to do great work.
- Motivation: the employee doesn’t have the motivation to do great work.
The first issue is pretty simple and you can fix it by either training the employee or hiring somebody else.
However, the real challenge is really in the second issue, which is how to solve motivation issues? For this, you first need to identify what’s the root cause behind the lack of motivation because it could be due several things.
The book goes in details on how to identify the motivation issue and how to resolve it, so do yourself a favor and grab a copy of the book to learn more.