Page 135 - The Drucker Lectures

116 [ The Drucker Lectures

One way is to make it difficult for people to do the work
they’re already paid for. Another way is to tolerate the poor per-
former. The poor performer corrupts. If you have the fellow or
the woman who is getting old and they’ve been there 49 years,
then okay. “There but for the grace of God go I.” But otherwise,
accept that the poor performer lets his fellow workers down. You
have a duty not to tolerate the poor performer, a duty to the
performers. That quenches motivation, when they see that ev-
erybody gets the same praise, when we know perfectly well that
Jim or Jane hasn’t done a lick of work and what they have done is
shoddy. That demoralizes.
The third thing is when you misplace people. Spend time on
the placement of people. There is nothing worse than the belief
that anybody can do every job. That may work on the assembly
line, though even there, it’s not quite true. But when it comes to
knowledge work, you must spend time on placing people where
their strengths can become productive. Nothing so motivates as
achievement. And nothing so quenches motivation as frustration.
These are all very elementary hygiene rules; nothing new
about them. But like most hygiene rules, they’re disregarded.
And so put that burden of performance on people. And build the
idea of people appraising themselves into the work goal, the per-
formance goal, or whatever you call it. And then you don’t have
to sit in judgment. It’s not a good idea for human beings to sit
in judgment on others. But then performance will be the judge.
And performance will also show where the need is for learning.
In fact, one of the questions to ask when people appraise their
own performance is, “What do you need to learn? What do you
need to improve? What do you need to change?”
There are also things that people need practice in. They may
know the subject theoretically, but haven’t done it enough. It’s
not going back to school; it’s doing it more. In other cases, they
may have to read up on something. Maybe it’s been a long time