A short conversational excerpt from a YouTube video featuring Larry and Kenny Chapman discussing employee management. They present a three-part workforce distribution: top 20% (high performers), middle 60% (movable majority where training yields returns), and bottom 20% (low performers who lack willingness). Main advice: invest training and development in the middle 60%, retain and reward top performers, and remove bottom performers rather than spending disproportionate time trying to fix them.
Chapters
That's why I listen to parents say, I spend all my time punishing my kids. Well, you probably didn't spend much time in advance explaining to your kids what you wanted to do and showing them how to do it. The very same thing with employees. If you're spending all of your time managing the low end of your workforce, you haven't spent much time either training, giving them the confidence, or trusting them to do what you taught them to do. Here's what you have to understand, and I'm going to give you all the golden key about how to manage people. It's the smartest thing I ever said about managing people.
It is in my book and I.
Go through a lot of detail there.
It's called work for a reason.
But here it is, employees. You got the top 20%, you got.
The bottom 20%, you got the middle 60%. That's how it works all the time.
The top 20% are great people. If you never showed up, they still do their job. The bottom 20%, they're never gonna be any good. They're not gonna be any good at all. They don't wanna be any good. You could spend all of your time with them and managers do, trying to make them better. And there's a reason they're not any good. There's no desire to be any good. It's not about the ability, it's about the willingness. They have no willingness. And then you're working with the 60% in the middle. Now here's the way it works. Your top 20%, they're so good. They'll be great without you. And at some point they will leave you. Your best people always leave you. They just outgrow you. So you got to either hustle to keep them involved, engaged, paid enough, whatever it is, promoted enough, but at some point, they're still going to be some good to go away. The bottom 20%, you need to help them go away. You need to fire them. Remember, you can't fix them because they don't want to be fixed. You're left with the 60% in the middle.
Now, if you lose the top 20%.
And you lose the bottom 20%, you've got 60% there in the middle. Some of them can't wait to move up, some of them can't wait to move down. That's the way it is. But you never spend your time trying to fix the bottom 20%. If I went into 90% of the businesses in America, whether they were small business or major corporations, every HR team is spending all their time trying to train and fix the bottom 20%. And it is a waste of time and energy.
Absolutely. Well, you're definitely striking some cords there for sure. Expectations, consequences. Thanks for that, Larry. We've got true, true words that so, you know, thank you for that. As far as I think that's, you know, we're missing little key components. And think about those of you that I currently work and I draw. I literally flip chart that bell curve and I talk about how we design our training programs is really designed for that middle 60, because that's where the money's made. That's where, I mean, your top 20 is making you dough. But that's kind of your future. And I think you're right. You got to have the guts. And then it's like, yeah, but there's nobody out there. I can't let this crappy one go. Let me spend some time. Let me spend some time. And now you're operating out of fear and you're never going to get there. Right?
