Use the Star Chart to Rate Your Current Team

I’ve said something like this to many leaders: “One hour from now, we’re all going to be crystal clear about what you need to do in order to solve 90 percent of your people problems—permanently. We’re also going to have a clear, actionable development plan for every member of your team. You are now starting your journey toward having virtually no HR problems. We’ll get this done in one hour.”

Inevitably reactions vary. Some are doubtful; some are hopeful; some are highly skeptical, thinking about how adept their worst performers are at evading the accountability noose so that once this “program” has run its course, they can settle back into their lives as gentlemen-of-leisure or playground bully or even toxic jerk.

But I can assure you that my opening remarks are no exaggeration. This is the beginning of your journey toward eliminating 90 percent of your people problems. I know this because I’ve watched it work in many organizations, both profit and non-profit.

What the Star Chart Does (and Doesn’t) Measure

The Star Chart is a tool that brings objectivity and clarity to the people issues that currently feel subjective and cloudy. Evaluating people’s performance by quadrant is not a new idea, and certainly not one that I invented. In fact, variations on this theme have been around for years—largely because it works!

The Star Chart is an incredible tool that will change how you think about leading and developing your team. It’s important to keep in mind that the Star Chart doesn’t attempt to help you place a value on people. The Star Chart only measures a person’s effectiveness in her current role. It does not measure whether she is a good or bad human being. She may be a great family member, nice person, good parent, involved softball coach, caring friend, and so on. You’re not judging her as a person; you just want to assess how well she fits into your company and how effective she is at her job.

How the Star Chart Works

You’ll plot each of your key employees, one at a time, on the same Star Chart. You may have 50 people to plot. Use different colors, initials, and a large sheet of paper. Write small! Each time, think about a person’s performance in his current role.

The vertical (right attitudes) axis covers all of the “soft,” more subjective aspects of your employee’s contribution at work—what he’s like to live alongside and how he does (or doesn’t) embody the company’s right attitudes. The horizontal (effectiveness) axis assesses the more objective question of how much actual work he gets done.

Plotting the Vertical Axis: Right Attitudes

We’re now going to put the right attitudes we discovered in Chapter 3 to practical use, as a measuring stick for each employee’s behavior. You will estimate how much of the time he spends living out those attitudes that are core to your company’s culture.

Begin by estimating how much of his workday or week he spends living out the right attitudes, on a scale of one to 10. A person who scores a one on the vertical axis (and therefore is positioned on the bottom) would display the worst attitudes possible on the scale. A person who scores a 10 (and therefore is positioned on the top) would consistently display the best possible attitudes, with few or no slip-ups. A person who scores a five would be in the middle: half of the time living out those attitudes, or only living out some of them, and half of the time not.

What about employees who sometimes have wonderful attitudes but sometimes don’t? Maybe the person you’re grading typically has an exemplary outlook (embracing the right attitudes 90 to 95 percent of the time) from Monday afternoon to Wednesday, exhibits a moderately acceptable outlook (embracing right attitudes, say, 75 percent of the time) on Thursday, and is often a nightmare (embracing right attitudes in the 30- to 45-percent range) from Friday to Monday noon. But Tuesday and Wednesday, wow, he is great!

To put it in a different context, how would you feel if that person was your goalie: on fire every two games, okay for the next two, and a sieve for the last one? Would this track record make him a star? Probably not. Consistency matters. Consider overall behavior when you’re doing your Star Chart plotting.

Once you’ve estimated the right attitudes score, plot it on the vertical axis.

Plotting the Horizontal Axis: Effectiveness

The horizontal axis measures a person’s effectiveness in her current role. Estimate how much of her time in a given day or week is spent being productive in the role that she is currently being asked to fill.

Again, estimate a number from one to 10, and choose where she fits on the horizontal “effectiveness” axis. Remember: you’re not measuring her value as a person, you’re only measuring her effectiveness in the job she’s doing right now. You are focusing on job performance only.

• • •

Now that you’ve thought through your scores, bring the results from the vertical axis and horizontal axis together, and see which box your employee is currently living in.

Explaining the Boxes

Finally, label the quadrants. Starting from the upper right and moving counter-clockwise: Box A contains your stars; Box B, your potential stars; Box C, your wrong fits; and Box D, your productive-but-difficult staff members. Chapters 8 to 11 provide detailed strategies for how to build an HR plan for each of these four groups of people. For now, your goal should simply be classification.

At times, you may be tempted to score a person at a five (or precisely on the line dividing one box from its neighbor). If you do so, follow the rule that says that anyone who scores exactly five automatically gets bumped down to a four (and therefore goes into the “lower” box or lesser category). In other words, someone on the horizontal axis between a star and potential star becomes the latter if they score a five. The idea here is to have clarity, and choosing five is usually a way of copping out so that no one needs to take any action.

Repeat this process for each one of your team members until you have them all clearly plotted on the Star Chart.

Does the Star Chart Measure Promotability?

Let’s be clear on another point. The Star Chart measures a person’s effectiveness in his current role; it does not measure his promotability.

Say you own a retail store, and you need a greeter to hand out shopping carts and to smile and acknowledge every customer. Provided that your new hire has the right attitude and is handy with a drying towel when it rains, you have a star on your hands! Someday, he might go on to bigger things, but for now, he’s doing what you need done and he’s doing it well.

Let’s move ahead a few months, and now your new employee has won everyone’s heart. He’s always cheerful and has a kind word for everybody. He’s an inspiration. So when there’s an opening to run a register, he’s the obvious choice. Everyone loves him.

Soon it becomes apparent that he has no ability to deal with numbers. His register never balances and he’s floundering. Even though he’s got a great attitude, in this new role he moves back into the potential star box. And maybe because he knows he’s doing a bad job, his attitude sags as well, and he sinks lower into the wrong fit box. He was a star as a greeter, but is not promotable to a cashier position.

How Are People Likely to Respond to the Star Chart?

Who loves report cards in high school? That’s easy. The ones who think they’re going to get good marks. And who hates them? The ones who think they’re going to get bad marks.

Who loves tryouts for sports teams? The ones who’ve worked the hardest and know they’re going to be among the best. Who hates them? The ones who think they might be cut.

This isn’t a new or shocking idea. We live with performance expectations all our lives, and then abandon them when we enter our careers, just when the contributions we make matter most.

Your stars will love this process. Finally they’ll be recognized for their superior contribution and will begin to see their workplace become happy and productive.

Your potential stars may be intimidated at first, but because their hearts are in the right place, they really do want the company and themselves to get better. Soon they’ll be on board, getting coaching and training, or seeing their role adjusted so they can live in the star box, too.

Soon, the idea that everyone in the company is expected to live in the star box is just a fact of life. It’s not debated or hated. It’s obvious to everyone. If you work in any company, you have to try your best and have a good attitude, don’t you? Obviously! Isn’t this the assumption of every good person before they get into the workforce?

The people living in the bottom half of the Star Chart probably won’t love this process, because it’s going to challenge them to make some choices about how they want to approach their work. In fact, they’ll likely fight the process, disparage it to their coworkers, or even refuse to take part in it at first.

While implementing the Star Chart, take heart. German philosopher Arthur Schopen hauer pioneered the idea of the Three Stages of Truth in the 19th century. He maintained that all truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. You’ll find this to be true, too, as you begin using the Star Chart.

When you are implementing this or any new initiative in your business, ask yourself who will resist it or complain about it. Will it be the stars? If so, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it. They’re the people who care most and understand the business best. It’s pretty important that they support your new, significant ideas.

If it’s your non-stars (in other words, the ones who score low on the right attitudes axis and therefore live in the bottom half of the Star Chart) that hate the initiative, I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Your goal is to make your workplace comfortable for the people who care the most and uncomfortable for those who care least.

The Star Chart in Practice

I once worked with a large firm whose leaders wanted to improve company morale and performance. We began by plotting every person in the company on a Star Chart. When this was done, we were concerned to see that at least one quarter of the company was classified as non-stars. The top half of the chart was pretty evenly distributed with names. After a lot of discussion about what was causing their morale and productivity problems, we made a commitment to have everyone in the star box within two years.

Management began by doing reviews with every person in the business, being respectful, kind, and clear about which box each person currently occupied. They encouraged their stars, and drew up plans with everyone else detailing how they could move into the star box.

The people who landed on the top half of the Star Chart were easy to deal with. Some of them just needed coaching or training, some needed a tweak to their job description so that they could focus more on their areas of strength, and some needed a long overdue heart-to-heart talk about their place on the Star Chart so that their legitimate concerns could be addressed.

For those on the bottom half of the Star Chart, their problems were deeper and not so easy to address. There was a great deal of pushback from this group. They took every opportunity to undermine the process. They talked quietly among themselves in lunchrooms and laughed with coworkers about the new management fad that, like the flu, would soon pass. When it didn’t stop, they got more vocal, expressing their displeasure openly, even during interviews with management.

Despite this, leadership persisted and the process soon began yielding results. Longstanding issues came to the surface. Some people’s roles were repositioned to take better advantage of their areas of strength, and some found different jobs and others were asked to leave. Everyone hired from that point on was vetted using a rigorous process to determine both attitudes and competence.

As they stuck to the process, positivity gained momentum. Finally, little more than two years after the initiative began, every single person in the business was plotted as a star. Coinciding with this milestone, the business hit unprecedented highs in profit and morale.

Once we had a culture of star players, I met with each employee team, explaining the Star Chart and our philosophy of building a great culture (a great culture is filled with stars; a terrible culture tolerates non-stars). The interesting thing was that team after team was positively enthusiastic about the company’s commitment to ensuring that each person lived in that star box. Lots of stories were shared during these sessions about the misery of being forced to work with non-stars.

Good people want to work with other good people.

The Supreme Importance of Having Stars in Your Key Seats

In a survey published by Harvard Business Review, 13,000 senior managers and 112 companies were studied during a period of five years on the topic of building great managerial talent. The companies that performed best were those that took deliberate action to ensure that top-tier talent occupied the key seats in the business, and that underperformance triggered consequences. In two companies studied, star managers grew profits on average 105 percent, while non-star managers achieved no profit growth at all. The study points to something that all leaders know without having to read books or articles: Poor performers achieve poor results.

To me, the most illuminating finding of the study was that “only 16 percent of managers strongly agreed that their companies knew who the high and low performers were in the senior ranks.”¹

Though the respondents may have believed this to be the case, I don’t buy it. All leaders know who their weakest and strongest players are. They just choose to not act on that knowledge, so it looks to their subordinates as if they’re completely out of touch with reality and unaware of the most basic of team fundamentals: who is strong and who is weak.

If you were a hockey coach, the caliber of your players would not be a mystery, let alone to the average fan. You would have a list of your players based on performance, from best to worst. Each player would also know where he stood, based on his income, the ice time he received, and the points he put on the board. There are no secrets in that environment. Those who are most serious about winning are also the most serious about developing and deploying talent effectively.

People Action Steps

• Create a Star Chart, and plot all of your employees on the same Star Chart.

• Interview each employee, and tell them where they fit on the Star Chart.

• Don’t be deterred by opposition from non-stars. Stick with the process.

In Summary

The Star Chart is a simple way to turn something that seems very subjective (grading your team) into something that is much more objective.

• Grade each employee according to how much she lives out your company’s right attitudes in a typical week or month, on a scale from one to 10. Plot that number on the vertical axis.

• Assess each employee according to how productive each person is over the same time period, again on a scale from one to 10. Plot that number on the horizontal axis.

• Finally, plot the employee on the Star Chart, joining the two lines together. This will show you which box the employee fits in: star, potential star, wrong fit, or productive-but-difficult.

Your highest performers will love going through the process because their performance will finally be formally recognized. Your lowest performers may dislike the process and try to sabotage it, for similar reasons.