That’s one of the questions posed by David Cottrell in “Monday Morning Leadership.” The book by Cottrell, the president and chief executive officer of the CornerStone Leadership Institute in Dallas, presents the fictional tale of a manager named Jeff Walters, who has eight mentoring sessions with a semiretired business leader, Tony Pearce.

When Walters gets that employee performance question from his mentor, he quickly says that the acceptable level is smack in the middle of that reasonably good 50 percent. But Pearce corrects him: Every employee is performing at an acceptable level — even the dead weight, people he refers to as “falling stars.”

“You see,” Pearce explains, “the people at the very bottom of the chart are still on your team, so their behavior must be acceptable to you. In fact, many managers, and you probably know some of these people, actually reward their falling stars by giving them less work while acknowledging them with decent performance reviews.

“When you do that, you should expect more people to fall into that category. Why not do less when there are still rewards?”

Pearce points out that managers often make matters worse because they end up heaping more work on their best people to make up for the incompetent ones. And that means, of course, that your best employees might wind up being your unhappiest ones.

Great.

My two cents: Think about whether you punish good employees by, for example, giving them graveyard or weekend shifts because you simply can’t trust your weaker workers. If you have to do that and can’t fire the weak ones, make it clear what benefits people get for earning your trust: better pay, more vacation time and whatever else it takes to make them feel rewarded instead of penalized.

Cottrell’s book has excellent insights about managing, told in an engaging way. It’s worth reading.

A little something Slinky: A cautionary real-life anecdote is offered in Hans Finzel’s book, “Change Is Like a Slinky: 30 Strategies for Promoting and Surviving Change in Your Organization.”

Finzel describes how 50,000 of the 62,000 Swiss watchmakers lost their jobs from 1979 to 1981 because the world began shifting to quartz watches — mostly ones made in Asia. The Swiss didn’t appreciate how much the world was changing until it was too late.

“It was the Swiss themselves who invented the electronic quartz movement at their research institute in Neuchatel, Switzerland,” Finzel writes. “Yet when the Swiss researchers presented this revolutionary idea to the Swiss manufacturers in 1967, it was rejected.

“After all, it didn’t have a mainspring, it didn’t need bearings, it required almost no gears, it was battery powered and it was electronic. It couldn’t be the watch of the future. So sure were the manufacturers of that conclusion that they let their researchers showcase their useless invention at the World Watch Congress that year. Seiko took one look, and the rest is history.”

My two extra cents: The biggest cause of death is denial. People see their cholesterol rise, but they don’t change their diet. People find a lump, but they don’t see their doctor. They just pretend the problem will magically disappear.

The same thing is true with workplace problems, even if they are hardly life or death. The watchmakers downplayed their competition because they knew that changing to manufacturing quartz watches would be an inconvenience. So they pretended the idea would simply vanish.

But what vanished, of course, was their jobs.

In any career, the greatest skill is the ability to read the handwriting on the wall. It lets you leap from a fading company to a more stable competitor, or follow a bright star to an intriguing startup.

But if you’re in denial, you just might find your career ticking away.