Don’t Go Nuts Over A-Players. Improve Your “Lesser” Employees.

Most managers just dump all the work on their perceived “top guys/gals.” What if we managed differently?

There’s a lot of research in workforce management / HR / organizational health / organizational development circles around high-performing employees, and there’s almost no research around bad / toxic employees. This is probably fairly logical: we don’t often discuss failure at work, so why would we dedicate a lot of research effort to failing employees?

Northwestern University just did some research on “toxic” employees, and here’s a part that should make you rethink a lot of how we approach hiring, firing, retention, and development:

The results were startling. A top 1 percent superstar — a very rare high performer — brings an extra $5,300 in value by doing more work than an average employee does. Replacing a toxic worker with an average one creates an estimated $12,800 in cost savings over the same period by reducing the cost of turnover around that toxic worker. Similarly, replacing a…