Leading High Performers: It’s harder than it looks!

WE SPEND A LOT OF TIME MANAGING UNDER PERFORMERS

When you focus on setting a high standard for performance, it’s easy to fall into the habit of managing the exceptions: to focus on the people who fall behind, or don’t meet the minimum standard that you are trying to preserve.

The old saying that the squeakiest wheel gets the oil is as true in the leadership context as it is in every other aspect of life.

When people don’t perform to the required level, it’s only natural to want to help them – to coach, guide and motivate them, so that they can perform successfully. You can spend a hell of a lot of time and energy focusing on people who quite often have absolutely no interest in lifting their performance to meet your expectations.

And, while you’re busy focusing on the under performers, it’s easy to forget about the people in the team who are self-sufficient; the ones who just get the job done; the ones who don’t suck your time and energy, because they consistently do things the way you expect them to.

We’re quietly grateful for the ones who don’t constantly demand our attention, but this often leads to an unintended consequence: a few of these reliable people are genuine high performers, and neglecting them costs you way more than any of your under performers ever could.

In this newsletter, I start with a critical question. Do you know who your high performers are… really!? I give you some surefire ways to lead your team so that you get the most from your best. And of course, I give you a few of the traps for young players that you should probably try to avoid.

HOW WOULD YOU RECOGNIZE A HIGH PERFORMER?

I say quite often that many leaders don’t truly understand what a high-performing team is. They may think it’s about people getting on well, achieving consensus easily, and having a positive and friendly disposition.

While these are often useful traits, they aren’t necessarily a proxy for high performance – and some of them are quite the opposite. Likewise, I think many leaders struggle to work out who the high-performing individuals are.

One of my one-on-one mentoring clients said to me recently, “Marty, I’ve got a problem with one of my high performers. She’s really good most of the time, but she doesn’t accept feedback from me, even when it’s something pretty obvious. And I can’t get her to focus on the things that are most valuable to the team.“

I had to pause and take a breath, and when I responded, I chose my words quite carefully. “So, tell me, Greg, what is it about her that has you convinced she’s a high-performer?“

In the lengthy discussion that followed, Greg realized that she isn’t actually a high-performer after all. She is a highly intelligent, hard-working individual who does a lot of things right. But she also has some significant problems in the way she approaches her work, which undermine both her individual efforts and the performance of the team.

Turns out, she’s not a curious learner or a thoughtful decision-maker, as you’d expect a high performer to be. She’s more of an ego-driven workhorse. She has really strong commercial instincts, but not a lot of emotional intelligence.

So, true, she mostly produces excellent results from her individual efforts. But in my world, this person would need to do a huge amount of developmental work to be considered a high performer.

So, what is it that causes us to misclassify people as high-performers? There are four common observations that come into play here.

1. Sometimes, it’s because the results they produce are exceptional.

   Okay, I can live with this one. At least there’s a link to performance. But performance has to be considered more broadly than just by assessing the “what”. The “how” is equally important. It’s no good having a person who delivers great results, but leaves a huge amount of carnage in their wake, or who gets short-term results at the expense of long-term customer relationships. Your view of someone’s performance needs to be more holistic than just the delivery of KPIs.

2. Sometimes, we classify people as high performers because they think and sound like us.

   This is a super easy trap to fall into. We love to hire and promote people in our own image. “Oh, this person’s excellent. He thinks just like me.” It’s good for the ego, and it reaffirms that you are also a high performer. But there are two common problems here: the first is that often, you can be blindsided by a “yes person” who just wants to ingratiate themselves to you; and the second is that, if you have too many people like this around you, it weakens the team. There’s very little diversity of thought and opinion, and you fall into groupthink. I always used to say to my direct reports, “If you think the same as me, then at least one of us is redundant… and it’s probably not me.“

3. Sometimes, we classify people as high performers because they demonstrate characteristics that have been traditionally valued.

   For example, they may work long, hard hours and always seem busy… or they may be excellent communicators who you find it hard to argue with… or they may simply be extremely confident and project a level of knowledge and competence, whether they have it or not.

4. Some people are extraordinary in one particular area (but incredibly weak in other areas).

   Before you label someone as a high performer, it’s really worth thinking this through with a multi-dimensional assessment. To take a deeper dive on this, it’s really worth going back to one of my previous episodes: even though I recorded it over 12 months ago, it sticks in my head like it was yesterday: Ep.231: Talent Management. For someone to be considered a high performer, they wouldn’t have any fatal flaws or critical performance gaps in the areas that you consider to be important.

LEADING HIGH PERFORMERS FOR OUTSTANDING RESULTS

So, assuming you do have the odd high performer in your team, how do you get the most out of them?

The first thing is, make sure they know that you see them as a high performer.

You’d be amazed (or, maybe not?) at how many leaders take for granted that their people know how they’re perceived, without ever having a specific conversation about their performance, their strengths and weaknesses, or their career trajectory.

I even had a boss once (ironically, a really good boss), who said to me after a round of talent management, “Well, Marty, you know what I think of you?” I said, “No, actually, you’ve never had a proper conversation with me about it.“… to which he just laughed. I knew he thought very highly of me, but I had absolutely no idea what he thought my strengths and weaknesses were.

Sometimes people find it just as difficult to have a positive feedback conversation as a negative one. But as I like to say, for your people to feel secure in their role, they need to know three things every day when they come into work:

1. What are your expectations of me?

2. How am I performing in relation to those expectations?

3. What does my future hold?

The second way to get more out of your high performers is simply to not neglect them.

This seems obvious, but it has to be said. Just because high performers don’t require your constant support and involvement to do their job, doesn’t mean you should simply leave them to their own devices. They need as much guidance as anyone else – but it’s just a different type of guidance.

For your under performers, you spend a lot of time helping them to understand where their performance shortfalls are. You’re constantly trying to get them to lift, and this can be frustrating and time-consuming. You might even find yourself investing in poor performers more than you should: training them, hiring a coach for them, investing in other people to buddy with them to help them with their work.

This investment isn’t always wasted, but it most often is.

Why wouldn’t you invest this much (and a hell of a lot more) into your high performers?

Start by giving them as much feedback as possible. You want to help them to improve too: improve their effectiveness; improve the speed and trajectory of their career development; give them the nuanced tweaks that will make a difference to their executive presence and maturity.

Let me give you an example. I’ve had a lot of high performers work for me over the years, and I learned to pay a lot of attention to what they were doing, with one thought in mind: What will it take for them to get to the next level?

Almost without exception, high performers are driven and ambitious. They want to be rewarded for their outsized contribution. So, I would always try to work out what strengths they had that were underdeveloped, or that they weren’t using effectively. I’d think about their maturity. What would happen if they had to enter the shark tank of the next level up, and how well would they be able to hold their own with their peers at that level? Would they be confident making decisions of significantly greater scope, risk, and financial impact? Can they handle the additional complexity and ambiguity at the next level?

I saw it as my job to speed their way past me… to make sure they succeeded no matter what. But a lot of leaders leave their high performers to their own devices, because they never screw up enough to require their boss’s immediate attention.

My third tip to get the most out of your best is to stretch them.

This isn’t rocket science, but it’s incredibly important. Sometimes you need to lift an under performer by as much as 20%, just to get them to that minimum acceptable standard. Often, they can’t make it to the low watermark – but even if they do, what do you end up with? Someone who’s barely adequate in their role, who often slips below the standard, and still requires more support from you than the average team member on a weekly basis.

You end up working your butt off just to get an under performer to the starting line.

But think about this: what if you put that much effort into your top performer? What if you could lift her performance by 20%? How much would that be worth to you?

Your best performers don’t give you 10% more than your worst performers: they give you 100%, 150%, 200% more. Any improvements you make at this level pays you back in multiples, in terms of team performance. Yet, many leaders ignore that potential upside. Don’t ignore it: it’s like rocket fuel.

My fourth tip is to give your high-performers more.

Not more work – that’s just soul-destroying because, more often than not, you’re effectively rewarding their good work by assigning the work that should have been done by their less-effective peers.

When I say give them more, I mean more opportunity; more autonomy; more growth and development. Give them more occasions to learn, to study, and to improve. Give them more breadth of experience with stretch assignments. Give them more time with the people above you and the movers and shakers in your organization. Give them more access to information, and more ability to have impact.

Tip number five, elevate your top performers to lift others.

I think it’s really important that your high performers are seen as first among equals. While they may be structurally at the same level as their peers, you want them to be able to take on more accountability for cross-team outcomes. For example, this may require you to anoint them as the accountable person who oversees a large project or initiative.

This has a number of benefits. It gives them greater scope for growth and development. It gives them a boost in status without a formal promotion. It gives other people something to aspire to. It lets you see them perform at a higher level (which is a sort of dress rehearsal for how they might perform if you were to promote them). It reduces your own key person risk, which is something you should be thinking about all the time anyway if you’re a diligent leader.

Finally, tip number six, don’t allow underperformers to remain on the roster.

This is a simple one, but it’s so important. The quality of your team isn’t set by your strongest performer, it’s set by your weakest performer. If there’s a massive gap between the two ends of your team’s performance spectrum, the top performers are likely to ease off and perform way below their potential.

If you genuinely want to stretch your top performers, then leaving your poor performers in place makes them cynical and unmotivated and, eventually, they’ll leave to find a winning team where the leader takes performance seriously, not one who just pays lip service to it.

You can get these six tips above in a free PDF downloadable.

TRAPS FOR YOUNG PLAYERS

Let’s finish off by looking at some traps for young players when trying to lead your high performers.

1. Halo effect.

   Often, an individual who’s really strong in one area gets credit for being more competent than they actually are in other areas. The one that comes to mind readily is the situation where an individual who is highly competent technically is promoted into a leadership role. They may have very little potential or desire to be leaders, but they do have the drive and ambition to be promoted.

   For example, a genius finance person isn’t necessarily going to be able to make great decisions that require holistic judgment: the decisions that weigh up broad-based implications in areas like legal, and risk, and workplace relations, and customer satisfaction, and supply chain.

   Competence in one area doesn’t guarantee competence in another. I want to refer you to one of my all-time favorite business books, The Halo Effect.

2. The talented jerk.

   Occasionally when you have someone who’s incredibly talented, but left to their own devices, they can develop feelings of superiority, and they begin to behave as though they are privileged and untouchable. Most of your high performers aren’t going to be like this, but the odd one will show their true colors as a “talented jerk”.

   People like this may start throwing their weight around making it difficult for others to work productively with them. And, in the worst cases, it’s difficult for other people just to stomach being around them. They operate as if there are no constraints on them at all, and they’re definitely not team players.

   This normally combines a few of the previous symptoms we’ve already looked at: being a one-trick pony – great in one area, but poor in many others; getting the benefit of halo effect… so, it’s pretty important to make sure you monitor behavior as well as performance. If you don’t, your next difficult conversation might be with a so-called high performer.

3. Not going rogue.

   You have to make sure your high performers paint within the lines. Obviously, you don’t want to stifle their innovation because they’re likely to be self-starters, driven to improve things. You definitely don’t want to discourage that.

   But often, like all of us, they want to focus on their pet things, rather than the things that create the most value. It requires really strong leadership to make sure you keep your high performers on track. Often, with someone who is incredibly intelligent and competent, they will underestimate certain risks, or they’ll overestimate the impact that they can have on a complex corporate ecosystem. You have to stay close enough to your high performers to make sure that they’re using their immense talent for good rather than evil.

   Strong leadership is just as important with your top talent as it is with your under performers.

LIBERATE THE MASSIVE POTENTIAL OF YOUR HIGH PERFORMERS

Leading high performers takes a lot of thought. Even though they’re likely to be more self-directed than your average team member, most leaders leave a ton of upside on the table that they could otherwise eke out of their best people.

Remember, even your very best people on their very best day will be operating at maybe 80% to 85% of their ultimate capacity… which, let’s face it, is a hell of a lot more than your average person.

But what if you could get an extra 5% or 10% from your top performers? It would dwarf any additional performance that you could get by spending the same amount of time with the people who you have to drag kicking and screaming just to do their job.

Remember, it’s a lot easier to rein in a stallion than it is to flog a donkey.