Some problems are easy.

The person who steals or is insubordinate gets fired.  The all-star that always executes and goes above and beyond gets the big promotion.

But what to do with the really-close-to-being-really-good performer that you just can’t get to the next level, no matter how much time and energy you spend with them?  In my mind, this is the toughest HR challenge in business.

Jack Welch was a big proponent of Topgrading, a process (and a great book…I’ve put a link to Amazon below) for evaluating people and determining those worth investing in versus those that needed to be moved out of the organization.  He advocated assigning people an A, B or C, with A’s being all-stars that you do anything to hang onto, B’s being those with great potential that you work with to become A’s, and C’s being those that are probably never going to be A’s and should be shown the door.

It sounds simple enough, but it’s hard to do in reality.  It takes serious guts to make those kinds of decisions. 

Keep in mind that C’s aren’t necessarily bad performers.  In fact, in a company like GE, they were probably almost never bad performers.  However, they are missing something - it could be an intangible - that makes it very unlikely that they will ever be an A.

One thing is for sure: if you are going to keep your company growing, you’ve got to continually raise the quality of your organization’s talent.  You do that through education and training, hiring the best people you can find, and getting rid of those who can’t keep up.  Darwinistic, but true.

I guess that’s why great leaders and managers get paid the big bucks - to make the tough calls.