Managing employee performance has always been a critical component of a manager's responsibility and in difficult times it becomes even more critical. The problem with managing employee performance is that there are too many external variables that affect an individual's performance. Also, employees vary in their capability and attitude to work making no two situations and no two employees the same. In such a situation, it becomes difficult to have a standard approach towards resolving performance-related problems. Since no two people or situations are the same, it would be advisable for managers to treat each of their employees differently. A manager can adopt different strategies to deal with subordinates by appropriately playing the role of a mentor, a coach and/or a counselor depending on the latters' performance levels.

In today's overtly competitive world, one of the greatest concerns of managers is to get results and keep the achievers from leaving their organization. This might sound clichéd but it is an organizational reality that managers are learning to cope with. From the manager's perspective, this imperative of getting results not only emphasizes the importance of continuous growth of oneself but it is also to see that the achievers continue to grow with respect to the ever-increasing demands of continuous performance improvement in the workplace. The problem of dealing with performance-related issues is that no two people or two situations are exactly the same and therefore performance improvement solutions cannot be the same. In such a situation, it would make sense to focus on mentoring, coaching, and counseling to deal with the demands and requirements of different subordinates.

Mentoring, coaching and counseling as managerial activities has the potential to make managers better manage the performance of their subordinates as it would help them cater to the developmental requirements of different subordinates. In an article entitled "What Great Managers Do?" published in Harvard Business Review in the year 2005, Marcus Buckingham wrote about how great managers manage their subordinates. The author compares a great manager to a chess player and says that a great manager is able to discover, develop, and celebrate what is different about each employee who works for him.

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