Three Strategies to Develop—and Retain—Your High Performers

 

 

 

 

 

 

Many companies build cultures that are focused on controlling the output of low performers, rather than growing and unlocking everyone’s skills. This approach is low-ROI and ultimately problematic for high-performance cultures. Leaders spend an inordinate amount of time hand holding their least productive employee, instead of helping their strongest contributors move faster and do more.

Meanwhile, because these tactics are focused on pushing the work forward rather than figuring out how to get better, they fail to turn low performers into better performers. Ultimately, by failing to nurture skill or motivation, low performance cultures stunt growth and repel top talent.

For example, think about your KPI management meetings, where you review what KPIs are red (problematic), yellow, or green. Who is this meeting for? Its purpose is typically to ensure that low performers get the bare minimum done. But is it helping low performers improve? And is it the best use of high performers’ time?

Or consider traditional annual performance reviews, which are typically designed to strike fear in low performers rather than help high performers excel (which comes instead from continuous developmental coaching). Rigid goal setting and approval, mandatory training programs detailed procedural guidelines — none of these processes accelerate your most valuable employees.

Companies need to build cultures that are focused on keeping high performers and making new ones. Here are three strategies to help you do it.

1. Reduce meetings down to the minimum viable number

One of the biggest pain points in organizations today is too many meetings. High performers are often hit the hardest, because they are constantly dragged into conversations to help unblock their teammates or fix their issues. If you want to keep your top talent, you must free them up to spend more of their time on interesting, impactful work.

The first step is boiling meetings down to a minimum. Here’s a suggested meeting cadence that has worked for many teams. You can adapt it your situation.

First, establish a simple weekly team cadence that drives intensity, not pressure. Every team should have just three weekly meetings: prioritization on Monday; problem solving midweek; and “pencils down” (AKA stop working) on Friday. Prioritization is about aligning on the team’s strategy for the week. Problem solving is for discussing challenges that have been percolating between meetings. And pencils down is to review completed work, share feedback, and align on next steps.

Next, optimize your one-on-ones by using the best agenda, length and frequency. (Check out the following blog post for tips on conducting 1:1s : Why one-on-one meetings are vital for your direct report's success) You can complement and elevate the impact of 1:1s by being coach-like in everyday business conversations.

This approach means that coaching employees is no longer just “come into my office or join me on a TEAMS call so I can coach you” way of leading someone. Because coaching is an in-the-moment behavior of staying curious a little longer, rushing to advice a little more slowly. It can be an everyday experience of choosing to be coach-like in any interaction, any channel and any moment.

To accomplish this, you need to learn how to use the different communication channels where you can be more coach-like, and the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Synchronous: In person, on video, and over the phone.

You’re communicating with the person in real time. Whenever you’re doing that, you can be more coach-like. You don’t have to schedule a coaching call. You don’t have to summon them into the special coaching room.

Video is a common channel these days, particularly in this world of remote workers and dispersed teams. With Teams, Zoom, Skype or FaceTime you can connect, be curious and ask good questions. Coaching by phone gives you all the benefits of being present with the other person without the distractions of being with them in person.

Asynchronous: Email, Teams DM, and text

Asynchronous channels such as email, slack, Teams, and texting, where it doesn’t have to be live, immediate exchange, tend to be overlooked as channels for being more coach-like. When you’re not in the presence of the other person, you can easily forget that your role is to help them discover the real problem and real solution, to get smarter and more self-sufficient, and not necessarily be the provider of the solution all the time.

Finally, strip down goal planning to the bare minimum: one quarterly “goal check” conversation. During a goal check, the team should align on its strategy for the next three months. These are the priorities that will anchor the weekly cadence of prioritization, problem solving, and pencils down.

Once you’ve taken extra meetings off the calendar, people’s time will be cleared up for high-leverage work and problem solving. This improves everybody’s work, but it has an especially high impact on top performers.

2. Measure your team’s motivation

When teams get stuck in vicious cycles and aren’t improving, high performers get frustrated. In contrast, teams that measure motivation have a blameless, action-oriented conversation about how to improve and where they’re getting stalled out. This allows high performers to take ownership, facilitate problem solving, and build a team culture that’s worth sticking around for.

You can measure motivation by using your own preferred survey tool such as Survey Monkey. Whatever tool you use, you should be asking questions like the following:

• ·    What are employees excited about working on in the upcoming quarter?
• What might be causing them anxiety or pressure?
• What habits does the team want to improve?
• What are some specific ideas to improve those habits?
• What did we do really well last quarter that we should maintain?

Like the goal check, teams should conduct a quarterly well-being check where they answer questions like the above and craft an improvement plan for the quarter.

3. Routinely mentor high performers on concrete, high-leverage skills

Many high performers leave because they no longer feel they are growing in their role. This is often a result of an extremely painful performance review process, where the focus is on evaluation of past results and assigning blame rather than providing helpful advice on development and growth. The next time your team does performance reviews, anchor the conversation around concrete skills that you believe will increase performance. This shifts the mindset from evaluation of past actions to learning for the future.

In most cases, few leaders know which skills to prioritize teaching, or even how to teach them. I’ve found the skill sets of problem solving, organizing teams, and leadership to be the most critical — and yet the least developed.

To make skill development easy, schedule a quarterly skill-check meeting with each of your direct reports. During a one-hour conversation, help your direct report reflect on their current skill goals and, if they don’t yet have any or have hit them all, pick a new one.

Doing so will shift the culture changes from one where “squeaky wheels” and underperformers get feedback, and instead, leaders have forward-looking conversations to build up their high performers. High performers will take skill-based advice and run with it, allowing them to grow in place, instead of jumping to a new job. Loyalty and performance grow hand in hand.

No matter the kind of business you run or the people on your team, it is worth investing in a high-performance culture. When companies make the switch, they’ll see significant improvements in sales, quality, and customer satisfaction, all while improving employee retention and motivation.

If you can build a high-performer focused culture, not only will you retain your top talent, you’ll also elevate every employee and make your company a standout in your industry.

Check out a related post: How to Coach High Performers to Go Even Higher (3 min read)

To your greater success and fulfillment,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

Take the Next Step...
Interested in learning how to develop your organization's leadership capability, culture, and employee engagement ? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees or a SMART Development consultant please 

contact: Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile:323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, restaurants, stores, energy storage and facilities management, distribution centers, food production facilities, wealth management services, real estate services, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.