How To Not Lose Your Star Performers
High performers need a continuous flow of context, support, and validation from their leaders. 10X your team by doubling down on context sharing, validation, and skillset development.
Leaders are naturally drawn into spending the majority of their time coaching and managing average and low performers. They have more challenges, need more guidance, and create fire drills. Meanwhile, leaders effectively ignore their high performers, hoping that they can just “run”.
It turns out that high performers need more support than most leaders realize — the majority of their time, in fact. Below are some common feedback leaders get when they under-invest in top performers:
I haven’t heard from my manager in weeks. I don’t even know if she likes me.
I’ve been doing a ton of work and carrying the bulk of the load for the team. But it’s unsustainable. And my manager is too busy to help me prioritize.
I’m not invited to the senior leadership conversations as an individual contributor. So I feel like I’m running blind half the time, hoping that the things I propose will work out.
I see my manager spending most of his time with my teammates. Perhaps they have more important areas of work than me.
Without regular support and validation, high performers will become mediocre. And over time, team performance trends towards an average. In too many cases, high performers will burn out, become resentful, and leave the team.
To take an analogy from sports: in a game, coaches spend most of their time with their star players, not the people sitting on the sidelines or playing minor positions. In American football, the coach has a direct line to the quarterback. In soccer, the coach talks directly with the captain. In basketball, who’s the coach shouting at? the highest-paid, most impactful star of the team. They are not only the best at their job, they frequently carry the entire team and game.
To build a high-performing team, invest the majority of your time in high performers. Their continued success requires a disproportionate amount of scarce commodities (e.g. time and attention, exposure to leadership, cold hard cash) and career development (e.g. leadership coaching, courses). This is the best way to raise the bar for your team and yourself.
Myth #1: High performers don’t want input
Take a look at your last two weeks. How many hours did you spend 1:1 with your high performers? Was it even 1? I regularly coach my clients to spend at least 5-8 hours a week with their high performers between quick 1:1 conversations, in-depth discussions, and group meetings. They find this surprising, and offer some common worries:
“They don’t want to be told what to do!”
“My job is to get out of their way and let them do their thing.”
This is true. High performers do not want to be micro-managed. They want to be given challenges that play to their strengths and allow them to shine. They want to control how the tasks are accomplished. With more senior team members, they also want to define the vision and strategy and influence the priority of work.
What leaders get wrong is how to spend time with their high performers. They don’t need you to dictate the how. Instead, they need you to proactively seek out and share new information and relevant context for the work they are driving. As their manager, you have access to forums they do not — you are part of more senior conversations, cross-team discussions, and escalations. You have relationships with executives and key partners they do not have. Learn what you can uniquely learn as a manager, and relay it back to your top performers.
Yue’s Coaching Corner
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Perhaps you know that the CMO is getting concerned about budget spend, and your high performer is working on a proposal to increase spending in growth marketing.
Perhaps you recently heard about another team working on a similar project to your high performer, and they might lead to duplication of work.
Perhaps you just got a heads-up that the VP of Engineering is leaning towards a year-end code freeze that will cut into the launch schedule for your high performer.
Sharing this type of context with high performers running fast toward goals will help them see around the corner and avoid unexpected speed bumps. Be careful not to get into being prescriptive about how they should incorporate this information into their work though. This is where you are stepping into the “how” and potentially micro-managing the work. Share what you know, offer to get clarifications, and let your high performer adjust her plans accordingly.
Myth #2: My high performer knows she is doing great
Leaders often think that high performers know they are doing well and their work is appreciated.
“She’s doing so great! It’s clear she is the best on the team. She must know it.”
“He’s doing so well that I’m completely hands-off and trust him to do the job well. I haven’t even talked to him for two weeks.”
It turns out that high performers need validation more than your average team member. They are often the ones pushing boundaries on innovation, taking calculated risks, and experimenting with new ways of working. It’s scary to deviate from the status quo and “how it’s been done'“. High performers are also often overachievers because they can be insecure about how they’re doing, so they over-deliver. They need regular reassurance that they are on the right path and have the support of leaders behind them.
Different people want validation in different ways. For some, it’s acknowledging their contributions publicly or holding them up as examples for others on the team. For some, it’s quick Slack messages or texts letting them know that you see what they are doing and you appreciate their efforts. Make the effort to learn what your high-performer needs to know to reassure them they are doing fantastic. When in doubt, try a few different methods, and see what triggers the most positive response.
Your high performers don’t want you dictating the day-to-day work, but they will definitely appreciate you for recognizing their hard work and regularly letting them know that they are indeed high performers!
Myth #3: I don’t need to invest in developing my high-performers
I often see managers create learning and development plans for their low performers only. They fund courses and accelerator programs, hoping to turn around their low performance. This may create resentment from the high performers, who feel that more attention and resources are being spent elsewhere.
It turns out that those same dollars are often much better spent on high performers instead. It is often much easier to boost the positive momentum of a rising star than to turn around the perception of a low performer. Rather than helping your low performers go from 0.5X to 1X, you can help your high performers go from 3X to 6X. In both cases, you are doubling impact — but look at the difference in magnitude.
Your high performers are hungry to learn. Let them know that they are doing well and that you want to see them be even more successful. Then offer them opportunities to present to senior leadership, hire them a leadership coach, or give them a stipend to spend on personal development however they’d like.
Myth #4: How I spend time doesn’t matter much to them
Your time and attention is a valuable and limited resource. When you spend a lot of it with the average and low performers, your high performers notice. A high performer who feels ignored will try to get your attention, sometimes by doing the exact opposite of what you want them to do. They may think they are doing some wrong and adjust their approach to be more like the average performers (who are getting your attention). Before you know it, they’re no longer confident in their decision-making, wasting cycles “getting buy-in”, or no longer pursuing a promising new opportunity.
Toddlers thrive on constant positive reinforcement. Adults and high performers aren’t too different. If someone on your team is doing something you like and you want them to do more of it, then give it positive reinforcement. If you don’t, the behavior will go away. Make it a TODO every week to proactively call out behaviors and actions you want more of. Focus on the best practices and the successes, and the overall performance of the team will also rise through role modeling. Neglect this positive cycle, and you’ll often find yourself losing your high performers and investing too much into your low performers.
That’s all folks! See you next week at 3:14 pm.
Yue
More on Building a High-Performance Team
How to Create Team Values that Drive Performance
How to Instill Urgency In Your Team
Solve "Too Many Meetings" To Increase Team Effectiveness and Morale
6 Lessons in Leadership From Parenting (a personal fav!)
Love the input. I agree with what you wrote.
In myself struggled making sufficient time for my high-performers because I was mainly busy getting the juniors on track. That's why I invested time into setting up my high-performers as coaches for the juniors, so I could strategize more with the experts.
In the end, it is all about trying to establish the high-performers as your partners and showing them appreciation (as mentioned by you).