11/2/23, 10:32 AM The Four Quadrants of Employee Performance | by Daniel Stillman | Sep, 2023 | Medium

Get unlimited access to the best of Medium for less than $1/week. Become a member

The Four Quadrants of Employee Performance

How to frame hiring, retaining and developing talent while scaling your company
culture intentionally.

Daniel Stillman · Follow

6 min read · Sep 13

Listen Share More

This essay first published on my blog at danielstillman.com

Hiring, retaining and developing talent is a key leadership skill. Without great talent
it’s impossible to have a great team. And without a great team, it’s impossible to build a

https://daniel-stillman.medium.com/the-four-quadrants-of-employee-performance-6eaf21449177 1/16
11/2/23, 10:32 AM The Four Quadrants of Employee Performance | by Daniel Stillman | Sep, 2023 | Medium

great organization.

Hiring, retaining and developing talent is also time consuming, both in amount of time
daily and weekly and length of time, over months.

How much time?

The HBR classic The First 90 Days (summarized here) has a diagram that explains that a
new hire can actually take 3 months to start delivering value and another 3 months to
start to see a breakeven return on your investment.

The space under the line to the lower left is “value consumed” as a hire learns about
the organization and the job. There’s no net contribution to be expected until three
months in (90 days) — that’s one of the main reasons that new hires should read The
First 90 Days, and use it to develop a plan to manage expectations of their employers —
which are always high!

You, as a Leader, are understandably itchy to hire employees that can “hit the ground
running” on day one…but that’s rarely a realistic expectation.

https://daniel-stillman.medium.com/the-four-quadrants-of-employee-performance-6eaf21449177 2/16
11/2/23, 10:32 AM The Four Quadrants of Employee Performance | by Daniel Stillman | Sep, 2023 | Medium

Does that mean you have to wait for 3–6 months to find out if you’ve made a good hire?

THE FOUR QUADRANTS OF EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE

Danny Meyer is one of my favorite business thinkers. He’s the pioneering restaurateur
behind such acclaimed establishments as Gramercy Tavern, Blue Smoke, and the
amazing and ubiquitous Shake Shack. He’s also renowned for his focus on genuine
hospitality and employee-first business thinking through his consulting firm, Union
Square Hospitality Group.

He wrote one of my favorite business books, Setting the Table. Read it!

Danny recently shared one of his most impactful leadership frameworks with Tim
Ferris and summarized it here. The core idea is that there are four essential types of
employees with four different attitudes towards performance. For each, you can have
an action point and a time frame when you start to discover what kind of employee
they are.

FLOWERS AND GEMS, PUZZLES AND CANDLES

Meyer breaks down the four quadrants of employee performance this way: Can and
Can’t, Will and Won’t.

https://daniel-stillman.medium.com/the-four-quadrants-of-employee-performance-6eaf21449177 3/16
11/2/23, 10:32 AM The Four Quadrants of Employee Performance | by Daniel Stillman | Sep, 2023 | Medium

“If you’ve got somebody who can and will, I want to celebrate that person. Those are my
flowers. I really want to water them.”

It’s easy for leaders to take the Can/Will employees for granted. But it’s important to
“water these flowers” with praise and recognition. This helps with retention, sure, but
it also makes it clear what kind of culture you want to cultivate. More on that later.

“If you have someone who can’t but will, I’m gonna coach them. The wick on my candle is
pretty long for someone who will…If you can teach them how to do the thing, they’ve got the
right hospitality attitude. Once they learn …you’re going to have a loyal employee for life.”

What’s amazing here is that Meyer goes on to say that he has a “six month wick” for
these folks (just like HBR suggests!) …and refers to these employees as gems.

Employees that have the right mindset but not the skillset are diamonds in the rough.
Many things are teachable. Hospitality, in Meyer’s view, is something that is easier to
hire for than to coach.

Coaching is a crucial skill for leaders, and one that is rarely taught. Cultivating a
coaching leadership style is one of the key pillars of conversational leadership. You can
check out a summary of my core coaching frameworks for leaders here.

CAN’T AND WON’T: LIGHT A CANDLE UNDER THEM

Unmotivated and underperforming team members affect the whole team’s morale and
productivity. Meyer says:

“Someone who can’t and won’t, I’m going to put the candle underneath their rear end, and
they’re going to have to learn that this isn’t working, because the longer that person stays…
everyone else on the team says, “why should I try?”

I’ve seen this play out firsthand in my executive coaching practice. A client of mine
made a significant hire and found that this person lacked some crucial skills and
essential attitudes that got missed in the hiring process. At the two month mark, we
agreed that they would light a candle under that hire. That conversation cleared a
pathway to letting the hire go at the three month mark if there wasn’t radical
improvement. The frustration and disappointment my client worked through in the
https://daniel-stillman.medium.com/the-four-quadrants-of-employee-performance-6eaf21449177 4/16
11/2/23, 10:32 AM The Four Quadrants of Employee Performance | by Daniel Stillman | Sep, 2023 | Medium

first two months was alleviated by clear communication of expectations and goals, and
it made the process of letting the hire go a month later much more smooth and regret-
free.

CAN AND WON’T: THE TOUGHEST PUZZLE

It’s like trying to make a puzzle piece fit into the wrong slot, over and over again — but
no matter how much the edges fray, it’s just not a perfect fit.

“The hardest one I find is the can but won’t, that’s the person that you can say to them
“You’re way better than this, but for some reason, you’re just choosing not to bring it here.”

He describes the process of letting these Can’t/Won’t employees go as saying “you’re a

great player, but I think you are part of a different puzzle”.

Meyer’s four quadrants, key action points and time windows are summed up here:

THE CULTURE EQUATION (OR, HOW TO SCALE CULTURE)

Meyer suggests, later in his interview with Tim Ferris, that the culture you have is, in
essence, the sum of all the ideal behaviors you reward and celebrate minus all of the
unwanted behaviors you tolerate.

https://daniel-stillman.medium.com/the-four-quadrants-of-employee-performance-6eaf21449177 5/16
11/2/23, 10:32 AM The Four Quadrants of Employee Performance | by Daniel Stillman | Sep, 2023 | Medium

Meyers believes that employees will notice when you, as a leader, tolerate the
Can/Won’t and the Can’t/Won’t folks, thinking to themselves:

“Why do they keep batting that person in the lineup instead of benching them or sending
them to the minor leagues!?”

The way to scale culture is, in short, watering your flowers assiduously and lighting
candles intentionally under your potential puzzle pieces.

Easy, right?!

In practice, this is hard. Having so-called difficult conversations are, by definition,

Open in app
difficult. Leaders avoid these uncomfortable conversations and let them simmer,
hoping they’llSearch
resolve themselves, somehow.

Meyer’s culture equation points out the cost of doing nothing — it’s impossible to scale
the culture you want to create if you let your underperforming employees sap the
energy of your flowers and gems.

LEANING INTO THE COACHING CONVERSATION: CONVERSATIONAL

LEADERSHIP

https://daniel-stillman.medium.com/the-four-quadrants-of-employee-performance-6eaf21449177 6/16
11/2/23, 10:32 AM The Four Quadrants of Employee Performance | by Daniel Stillman | Sep, 2023 | Medium

Watering Flowers and letting Puzzle pieces go isn’t quite enough. Your highest ROI
employees are actually the gems — Can’t/Will folks who need more support and
coaching to unlock their potential.

In fact, if you’re working in a high complexity and high volatility environment,

eventually everyone, you included, will be faced with an uncertain situation for which
there is no easy solution. At some point, we’re all going to be in a Can’t moment. If
we’re going to step into the Can’t/Will attitude, and help our teams to do the same,
coaching is going to be a perennially crucial skill.

If we can foster a coaching mindset for ourselves and our teams, we can always turn
Can’t into Can with a calm, consistent Will.

If you want to hone your skills as a coaching leader, check out my essay here. If you
want a coach for yourself, check out my coaching page here and see if I might be a
good fit for your needs.

Leadership Hiring Culture Coaching Development

Follow

Written by Daniel Stillman

2K Followers

Executive coach. Host of theconversationfactory.com. Often riding bikes to the ocean.

More from Daniel Stillman

https://daniel-stillman.medium.com/the-four-quadrants-of-employee-performance-6eaf21449177 7/16
11/2/23, 10:32 AM The Four Quadrants of Employee Performance | by Daniel Stillman | Sep, 2023 | Medium

Daniel Stillman

Facilitation Means Designing Conversations

This post was first published on the Meeteor Blog

7 min read · Oct 3, 2017

228

https://daniel-stillman.medium.com/the-four-quadrants-of-employee-performance-6eaf21449177 8/16
11/2/23, 10:32 AM The Four Quadrants of Employee Performance | by Daniel Stillman | Sep, 2023 | Medium

in
Daniel Stillman The Conversation Factory

The Four Quadrants of Conversational Leadership

Leading through asking and framing

6 min read · Jun 18, 2019

65

in
Daniel Stillman UX Collective

Abstraction Laddering: the most fundamental problem-framing tool ever

“If we have our own Why in Life, We shall get along with almost any How”

6 min read · Apr 21, 2022

279 3

https://daniel-stillman.medium.com/the-four-quadrants-of-employee-performance-6eaf21449177 9/16
11/2/23, 10:32 AM The Four Quadrants of Employee Performance | by Daniel Stillman | Sep, 2023 | Medium

in
Daniel Stillman NYC Design

6 Steps to Design Better Collaboration: The Paper Airplane Experiment

The challenges that teams come up against when they are trying to innovate and transform what
they make and how they make it, come down to…

8 min read · Nov 9, 2017

180 2

See all from Daniel Stillman

Recommended from Medium

https://daniel-stillman.medium.com/the-four-quadrants-of-employee-performance-6eaf21449177 10/16
11/2/23, 10:32 AM The Four Quadrants of Employee Performance | by Daniel Stillman | Sep, 2023 | Medium

in
Hritik Jaiswal helpshift-engineering

1–on-1 with your manager will be more effective after reading this post
Recently, I read Chapter 1 of the book “The Manager’s Path” which describes the basics of being
managed and what to expect from a manager.

5 min read · May 9

4.1K 44

https://daniel-stillman.medium.com/the-four-quadrants-of-employee-performance-6eaf21449177 11/16
11/2/23, 10:32 AM The Four Quadrants of Employee Performance | by Daniel Stillman | Sep, 2023 | Medium

Joe Procopio

The End of SaaS Is Closer Than You Think

Users don’t want another screen

· 5 min read · Oct 12

2.3K 49

Lists

Intro to People Ops: Not Your Mama's HR

8 stories · 35 saves

How to Run More Meaningful 1:1 Meetings

11 stories · 186 saves

Company Offsite Reading List

8 stories · 57 saves

How to Give Difficult Feedback

7 stories · 284 saves

https://daniel-stillman.medium.com/the-four-quadrants-of-employee-performance-6eaf21449177 12/16
11/2/23, 10:32 AM The Four Quadrants of Employee Performance | by Daniel Stillman | Sep, 2023 | Medium

dani herrera

What Does Toxic Leadership Look Like: 5 Real Examples

Not every Manager is a Leader, and not every Leader is a great Leader! Let’s uncover some of the
most common, toxic, and harmful leadership…

· 5 min read · Aug 28

362 10

https://daniel-stillman.medium.com/the-four-quadrants-of-employee-performance-6eaf21449177 13/16
11/2/23, 10:32 AM The Four Quadrants of Employee Performance | by Daniel Stillman | Sep, 2023 | Medium

Saumil Mehta

Three Simple Hacks to Manage your Manager

In one of my startup jobs, I worked with a colleague who had suddenly gained one of the founders’
strong trust and support. The two of them…

7 min read · Feb 8

721 9

https://daniel-stillman.medium.com/the-four-quadrants-of-employee-performance-6eaf21449177 14/16
11/2/23, 10:32 AM The Four Quadrants of Employee Performance | by Daniel Stillman | Sep, 2023 | Medium

in
Vaishnav Manoj DataX Journal

JSON is incredibly slow: Here’s What’s Faster!

Unlocking the Need for Speed: Optimizing JSON Performance for Lightning-Fast Apps and
Finding Alternatives to it!

16 min read · Sep 28

5.1K 63

https://daniel-stillman.medium.com/the-four-quadrants-of-employee-performance-6eaf21449177 15/16
11/2/23, 10:32 AM The Four Quadrants of Employee Performance | by Daniel Stillman | Sep, 2023 | Medium

in
Elvis Hsiao UX Collective

Why you’re not supposed to put a case on your smartphone

The untold impact on design, user experience, and even your psychology

· 8 min read · Oct 8

3.4K 166

See more recommendations

https://daniel-stillman.medium.com/the-four-quadrants-of-employee-performance-6eaf21449177 16/16