In all walks of life we find certain broad categories of people, those who work, and those who do not work, and there’s also a category of people who pretend that they work but actually their contribution is insignificant. We find that the last category of people sometimes rob the first type of its rightful credit and reward owing to their ability to create false impression of being thorough and hard-working, on the other hand  the first category at times may fail to create the impression of real contributors. A perceptive manager must always be able to separate wheat from the chaff i.e. he must be able to spot the real performers from the pretenders. He understands the essence of the saying that not all movement is progress and his potential lies in sensing which movement is actually leading to progress and which movement is more for show. When in position of authority, it becomes important that we are able to spot the performers from people who appear to be performers. These are the parameters of finding the real performers:

1. Keep a subtle tab on who in your staff is able to convert his day’s work into achieving his profile and organization objective/s. An astute manager would carry out this exercise disassociating himself inwardly from people who are smooth talkers and seem to be making a lot of movement but fail to contribute in meeting organization goals on a repeated basis.

2.Check sincerity quotient in employees by indifferently entrusting the whole team with tasks such as coming up with new ideas for various assignments, suggestions for improvement, feedback on past projects etc. and then notice carefully who all actually work on these tasks and who takes it all casually.

3. See the involvement level in employees and their ability to focus. Their level of involvement would induce them to come up with promising ways and approach to work and their initiative to crack solutions to the bottlenecks. Their ability to focus would be reflected in their single-mindedness to achieving the set goals without taking refuge into excuses.

4.Their assertiveness and high performance spur others also to scale up their performance.

Though even in the category of people who work, there are some who effortlessly give high quality work while some diligently and painstakingly reach their objectives. The discerning manager would know where to use their skills most suitably and build high performance team without getting into the trap of all talk and no action employees.