Teachers have a lesson for business leaders

about how to improve their worst performers

U.S. businesses spent $71 billion training their employees last year. Perhaps they could have
kept some of that cash.

New research on boosting teacher performance suggests one of the most effective methods of
improving a workforce may also be the cheapest: pairing a firms weakest employees with its
strongest and asking them to bring the lower performer up to speed.

To test the theory, a team of researchers from Brown and Harvard conducted an experiment with
136 teachers at 14 public schools in Tennessee. (Tennessee was selected, in part, because it
measures teachers on 19 separate skill areas, from managing behavior to asking questions.)

Principals matched the schools highest-performing teachers in some areas with their lowest
performers in some of the same areas. The principals explicitly asked the pairs to work together
to help the weaker partner improve over the year.

The resulting gains in teacher performance, as measured by student test scores, were
meaningful, according to a working paper recently released by the National Bureau of
Economic Research.

The researchers reported that students of lower-performing teachers who took part in the study
saw their test scores rise by nearly one standard deviation, compared to similar students in
classes where the teacher didnt take part in the program. The scale of the improvements are
roughly akin to the difference in the value between a novice teacher and a veteran with five to 10
years of experience.

While the Tennessee study was limited to teachers, the underlying ideapairing high and low
performerswould make sense in lots of work places, Eric Taylor, one of the researchers, told
Quartz. The one caveat, he said, is that teachers may be different from other workers in that they
are notoriously isolated from one another.

In other words, in many businesses, employees may already be learning from their peers, which
could reduce any potential gains from pairing high-performing and low-performing workers.
Still, firms that depend on somewhat isolated individual workers, such as far-flung salespeople
or telecommuters, may benefit from such an approach.

Companies have incentives to experiment with different ways to develop their employees.
Despite the huge sums companies pay on training, its less than clear how much how much it
improves performance.

Laszlo Bock, Googles head of HR, surveyed the academic literature for his 2015 book Work
Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead. Bock found
experts believe as little as 5% of training is actually retained. Thats one reason Google invests
more in hiring than in training, Bock wrote.

For companies looking for a more cost-effective way to help low-performing employees
develop, the lesson of these Tennessee teachers might be worth a try.