Knowing What Differentiates Your Top Performers From Everyone Else

Take a look at Boston Red Sox: Backstop Your Business. (Read the PDF or the printer-friendly version.) Here’s my big take-away: You have to know what differentiates your top performers from everyone else — and it’s not a single dimension measurement. If you live in a yank-and-rank organization, figure out what you need to do to measure everyone’s overall contribution to the organization, before you start ranking.Of course, defining those contributions for the roles in your organization will make it much easier to ask questions about them. If you’re not performing a job analysis now, every time you want to hire someone (or write a performance evaluation), start. The job analysis will tell you what you really care about.