Higher individual output does not result in greater group output

Years ago, I was working in a production environment. We wanted to maximize the production of the location. We measured the output from each individual and the group as a whole.

We had several high performers and a few low performers. But most of the technicians were in the middle. They didn’t produce at a high level but didn’t produce at a low level. They were in the middle.

If we graphed this, we would likely see a bell-shaped curve. Most of the techs were in the middle. A handful were high producers and a handful were low producers.

As management, we were very concerned with driving up production. Obviously, the business wanted more output to create more revenue and in turn, more profit for the business.

If you were in this situation, what would be your strategy?

Would you simply bring in more people? Most likely that would result in a few high performers and a few low performers. But most would fall in the middle.

Would you drop the low producers? It makes sense to simply fire the lowest producers. Then, as you find replacements you will have some probability that you replace that low producer with another low producer. But more likely, you will replace that low performer with a midrange producer. There is even a chance that you find a high performer to replace that low performer.

Would you give financial incentives to the highest producers? This does 2 things. First, it incentivizes those high performers. It motivates them to produce even more. And, it motivates others to perform at a high level so they, too, can receive those bonuses.

I was lucky enough to live through this experiment. We tried several tactics, finding that certain things worked better. Some obvious tactics actually resulted in decreasing group performance. But several things happened that seemed to be opposite of common sense.

If I asked you if reducing the high producers would result in higher production, you would say that is not possible. Yet in a few instances, this is what we observed. We had a few high performers quit, get fired, or move to another area of the company. Slowly, we started to see production increase.

This is strange. Some of the executives in the company refused to accept that this was occurring. They would say that they are not related. They said it was coincidence that production was increasing as we lost high producers.

Now, this was not a scientific experiment. It was the real world. As such, we often had several things happening at once so we can’t isolate each variable completely. Performance metrics grew more accurate. We incentivized everyone to produce at a higher rate. In other words, we were trying many tactics simultaneously. Therefore, we can’t know for certain what caused the changes in production.

But our unscientific findings are still interesting. We were keenly aware of patterns. So, if something happened once, we noted it. If it happened multiple times we would start to dive in and see why it kept recurring. Most of the insights I am providing come from the patterns, not the one-off instances.

FOCUSING ON TOP PERFORMERS HURT GROUP PRODUCTIVITY

One of the findings that was interesting, was that when we focused on top performers and rewarded them, group performance stalled. We would give them bonuses or higher raises. We would encourage them with positive feedback. We would allow more leniency and freedom to operate during their day.

The group performance didn’t increase. In fact, often the group performance would dip a little. The high performers would still produce at or above their previous levels most of the time. But this never seemed to translate to higher group productivity.

This flies in the face of logic. If everyone produces at a level, and we take the top performers and reward them, then others would work harder to get to that level, right? Wrong.

But if those top performers are rewarded, then they will produce even more to get even more rewards, right? Wrong again.

What we found was that the top performers already worked to their maximum ability. They would also get a sense of entitlement. This would create an environment where the top performers would act like they walked on water. They would produce, but then criticize the others.

The others in the company would see this and feel it isn’t fair. Even though they knew of the higher production, they didn’t accept that they weren’t in the elite group. So, they would slow down. They would produce less. Nobody accepts that they aren’t a top producer. In their mind they are one, even if the numbers don’t support that notion.

It often created unnecessary drama and tension in the office. We gained disgruntled employees. Everyone started bickering. Instead of working together, they pointed fingers and blamed others for every mistake.

Then something interesting happened. As one or more of these high performers left the company, production starting to increase.

Again, this flies in the face of logic. If a higher performer leaves, and we replace that individual with a mid or low performer, production should go down, not up. But that wasn’t the case. How can this be?

For some insight and a different way of looking at it, let’s shift gears. Let’s talk about hens and chicken production. Experiments in the 1980’s study this and relate to the group production conundrum.

Jonathan Haidt talks about these experiments in his book, The Righteous Mind, Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

He explains, “If you want to increase egg output, common sense tells you to breed only the hens that lay the most eggs. But the reality of the egg industry is that hens live crammed together into cages, and the best laying hens tend to be the more aggressive, dominant hens. Therefore, if you use individual selection (breeding only the most productive hens), total productivity actually goes down because aggressive behavior – including killing and cannibalism – goes up.”

In our production environment we didn’t see killing or cannibalism. We weren’t breeding anyone. But the same concepts seem to apply. The high producers tended to be the dominant and aggressive ones. And reducing the number of high performers actually improved the output.

Haidt goes on to say, “In the 1980’s the geneticist William Muir used group selection to get around this problem. He worked with cages containing twelve hens each, and he simply picked the cages that produced the most eggs in each generation. Then he bred all of the hens in those cages to produce the next generation. Within just three generations, aggression levels plummeted. By the sixth generation, the death rate fell from the horrific baseline of 67 percent to a mere 8 percent. Total eggs produced per hen jumped from 91 to 237, mostly because the hens started to live longer, but also because they laid more eggs per day. The group-selected hens were more productive than were those subjected to individual-level selection.”

So, is it possible that in a production environment, group-selected employees become more productive than using individual-level selection? Obviously, this is a huge stretch on my part. I get that. But it also seemed to align.

By focusing on the high producers and doing everything we could think of to expand this group, we were actually hurting the production of the company.

FOCUSING ON CREATING A POSITIVE CULTURE

We didn’t have the luxury of multiple generations of breeding chickens to find a solution. We had to figure it out and apply it now, in a real-world business environment.

We did find that focusing on the culture and environment had an impact. Focusing on group achievements kept the focus on what was best for the group. It quieted down the bickering. It allowed team players to produce more.

We abandoned the obvious tactics that should have worked. We started to look at the data. If something we did helped we made that the standard. If it didn't work, we went back to the old standard way of doing it.

By proving us all wrong, it made us realize that what we think we know isn't always true. Sometimes it is wrong. Sometimes it creates an opposite outcome from what we expect.

Whether this was was a strange coincidence or some business principle we will never know. All we know is that focusing on individual performance didn't work as well as we thought it should. Focusing on the achievements of each team helped create a better culture. That, in turn, created more output and more profit for the company.