The 10-80-10 rule takes this principle and applies it to human behavior in particular. If we take a company as an example and apply the 10-80-10 rule, the principle will look in essence as follows:
- High productivity elite (10%): These are the core of your business; these people will work all the hours your business will need without saving any effort and will generate maximum productivity and revenue for you.
- Producers (80%): These people make up the majority of your company, will work from 9 am to 5 pm, and complete their tasks without adding anything else, they will not offer innovative solutions, but they are effective, trustworthy, and obedient people.
- Unproductive and stubborn (10%): These people are arrogant, fortunately few, but they do work, they are hard to deal with and do not want to work hard, and they usually take more from your company than they give to it.
This principle can be applied in other areas of life. Ethics is another example that can be given about it, most of us (80%) are law-abiding citizens who only occasionally break the rules, 10% are good people, and the other 10% are relentless criminals.
Who Created the 10-80-10 Rule?
As we mentioned earlier, the 10-80-10 rule is a branch of the principle of Pareto, which was first imagined in the early twentieth century by the Italian civil engineer - later turned economist - "Wilfredo Pareto".
He simply noticed that 80% of the property in Italy at that time was owned by 20% of the population, according to Pareto, the distribution of wealth is 80/20 across all segments of society, and this principle works regardless of country, age, gender, or field of work.
Later in the 1940s, engineer and management consultant Joseph M. Juran applied the Pareto principle to human behavior to improve quality control. This is done by assuming that 80% of the success of any project is due to the efforts of 20% of the team working on it.
Many researchers and theorists have since extended the Pareto principle to the 10-80-10 rule, and have noted that 10% of people are true leaders, 80% seek direction from others, and the other 10% act in a way that leads to intentionally contrary results.
How to Apply the 10-80-10 Rule to Management to be More Successful?
Well, let us now keep using the team and workforce model as an example: If you want to improve productivity in your company, where should your focus be? Often, the most pressing things attract our attention, which means that we tend to try to start by fixing the most broken thing in our organization - the last 10% category - before moving to the lowest-risk category.
But this method will seem very ineffective when you realize that you are pouring resources on only 10% of your workforce. In addition, this 10% consists of people who are unlikely to change the way they work according to the statistics, so you need to focus on the 80% because it is the right place where you will make the most impact and work to achieve the greatest increase in productivity.
These 80% are not quite equal, and some of them will be closer than one of the two 10%, but that means you should be able to level up the best ones in the 10% range to get them closer to the 20 or 30%.
How Much Difference Will This Make?
Before you turn off your laptop and start brainstorming team-building exercises and organizing days out with your team, it is very important first to understand the scale by which you measure productivity, the numbers in the spreadsheet, or the letters next to the person's name, only explain part of the picture.
What you value in your company is unique to you, and Coach Daniel Mangena talks about the entrepreneurs and employers he frequently coaches:
"You must determine exactly what you ask of your team, your customers, and the whole world, and if you ask a vague question, you will get a vague answer, therefore, fully understand what works for you and what does not. To say that you just want to raise revenue is not enough, because you need to determine how much you want the revenue to rise, in which areas, who will give them the advantages to increase the money they spend with you, and where and whom you should target in the new growth of your company. "
What Will Your Company Become with the Help of This Desirable Increase in Productivity? Who Benefits from this Growth?
Armed with enough clarity to tell your team and start crafting an action plan, you can take a look at what motivates 80% of people who just need a little nudge, so start with those people with whom minimal effort yields maximum results.
A Gallup poll found that a third of the American workforce is unmotivated in their jobs, while the highest levels of motivation are found among managers, this tells us these two points:
- First, the unmotivated third is partly made up of those in the 80% camp, but the total number of unmotivated people who are in the 10% camp is in that third as well, and if you take out that 10% being the unmotivated people, the remaining is not a large number of people, and they are in a group that still wants to work and continue.
- Second, those in management positions — those who feel as if they can make a difference in the company — tend to be the most motivated.
But now let us not confuse motivation with productivity, it is possible to have great motivation, but without the right strategy or direction, you will miss the clarity and the tool that will help you to be productive. However, those managers who were highly motivated to become productive deserve to know their reasons by asking a few questions.
Why Did They Feel More Motivated?
Let us assume the simplest answer, they felt that their voices were heard and that they could influence change. It is a very important part of human psychology, to feel as if others care to listen to our opinions, thoughts, and feelings. When others ignore us, we feel worthless and, of course, lose motivation.
This does not mean that you have to make everyone a manager within your company, your business could be a startup, or just a few people working in the garage you are converting, and the whole point is making sure they all feel heard.
The greatest increase in productivity will be almost assured, especially between the upper limit of persons in the 80% range, simply by listening to them, making them feel as if they have the interest and benefit of growing your business as well.
If they can see that the role they are playing is important and well understood by you, they will push themselves to go further and work harder and achieve more, and you have to put yourself in their shoes, which brings us to the next point.
How to Use the 10-80-10 Rule to Improve Success?
OK, so far we have looked at the 10-80-10 rule for group success, but how does it apply to us as individuals? What can we learn from this rule to use in our daily lives?
You may be a trader or perhaps a consultant working on your own, anyone who does not have a team and sells their services to others, how would you use that base for your own business? Apply the 10-80-10 rule to yourself depending on the tasks. What do you do well or what are you most talented at? And what are you good at? What do you keep putting off doing?
Let us say you are a writer, and you are a very successful person, and you have been asked to write articles for a lot of great publishers like Life Hack, or maybe you are writing a book and your screenplay has been picked up by Warner Brothers, therefore, writing is the 10% of what you are good at. It is where you bring your greatest value.
It may not be the actual writing, as much as the creativity, ideas, and talent that you can use in your writing, the actual writing which involves sitting at your computer and proofreading and finding spelling and grammatical errors, is what makes up the 80%, So you are good at it for sure, you are competent and you get it done brilliantly, but it is not where you are at your strongest, and you usually run out of energy sometime during the day.
Next, there is the lowest percentage, that is, the remaining 10% that may relate to your operational tasks, such as timekeeping, account management, billing, correspondence, tax returns, and so on.
How Do You Become More Effective?
Where can you be most effective in taking actions that will support you in accelerating your growth? Start again at 80%, and try to find ways to improve your writing experience. You can observe yourself on a typical day and notice when you do your best. It may be right after your second cup of coffee, you stay at your desk longer and write with clarity and lucidity, so start organizing your day accordingly.
What did that cost you? Nothing, it was just a case of reorganizing your day, doing your best work in less time than it took you before, and soon found that you had more time and resources and that you were more productive.
Once you have better resources and bigger jobs, you will be able to take care of that pesky 10% limit and eliminate it through outsourcing, assigning someone else, this work.
Now, what is to stop you from taking that percentage into account, since you are making more money for less time?
In Conclusion
The 10-80-10 rule is not about adding rigid structures or following strict rules by themselves, that is because it is just a lens through which to view human behavior, including your own. The reason this rule is, or could be, the key to your success is that it enables you to identify those small changes that you can make to have the biggest impact on your growth.
If you categorize your business and the labor of your employees in this way, you will be able to see where you can get the greatest results with minimal energy, and your success will increase and you will have the support needed to maintain it if you continue to work by following this rule.
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