How to Find and Keep Rare Talent That Drives 800% More Value

Episode #315 How to Find and Keep Rare Talent That Drives 800% More Value

FINDING AND DEPLOYING RARE TALENT

I frequently mention high performers in passing, but I don’t often talk about how to find them, how to keep them, and how to get the most out of them.

Many teams never get to experience the joy of having a genuine high performer in their midst, and the thought of leading a real superstar can actually be a bit daunting, especially if you aren’t confident in your own leadership ability, or if you don’t have the appetite to stretch every individual in your team.

Let’s face it, genuine high performers provide a stark contrast to some of your other team members, and many leaders aren’t even prepared to face into the reality of that massive performance differential, let alone actually do something about it.

In this newsletter, I take a closer look at how to attract high-end talent and how to liberate their rare capability and impact to create massive value for your team.

I begin by looking at a Wall Street Journal article that takes a deep dive into managing high performers; I then go on to explore a critical question: “Where are all these high performers we hear about?”; I discuss two key barriers that make it even more difficult to get the best available talent on your team; and I finish with my top five tips for getting the most out of your superstars.

WHO ARE YOU SPENDING YOUR TIME WITH?

I talk frequently about high performance, and the impact that the very best individuals can have on the teams they’re part of. I recorded a pretty useful episode about six months ago, Ep.293: Leading High Performers. In this episode, I covered off on the basics of leading high performance:

• How to identify a high performer (which sounds simple, but it can be anything but!);
• The need to hold your high performers to holistic performance standards, rather than just relying on one dimensional excellence; and
• I highlighted a few of the traps for young players that you’re going to need to be aware of when you’re dealing with high performers.

I’d like you to think of this episode as a kind of prequel to that one. It was prompted by a great article I came across in the Wall Street Journal, which had some figures that surprised even me. The article was titled Are Superstar Employees Worth It?.

Written by Matthew McCall, a management professor at Texas A&M, it focuses on the challenge of leading high performers over the course of their career, ensuring their potential value is optimized at every stage.

Of course, it would be extremely rare these days that you’d retain any individual for their whole career. According to research from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a person is likely to have 12 different jobs over the course of their working life… and of course, most of those won’t be with you.

As you get into more senior roles though, you’ll have people coming into your teams at almost every stage of their careers. It’s really worth thinking about how to get the most from your superstars at each stage.

When you have a superstar individual contributor, the value of their contribution is pretty obvious, but between that role and their ascension to the CEO’s office, the way they contribute changes and the value that they can leverage can be phenomenal – if you know how to lead them.

Over the course of my corporate executive career, I eventually learned the lesson – which is an important rule of thumb – that I should spend 80% of my time with the top 20% of my people. That’s the top 20% in terms of performance, output, and impact.

But, somewhat counter-intuitively, we tend to give the most time to the people who demand the most attention – the ones who aren’t performing. The squeaky wheel gets the oil, right!?

Regardless of the seniority and experience of a high performer, you have to give them quality time and guidance befitting of their star status. Just like everyone else, they need direction on where to focus their enormous talent to best advantage. And to do this, you have to be prepared to set the highest standards and expectations for their performance and behavior, at every level they exist at.

SUPERSTARS GENERATE PHENOMENAL ROI

In an attempt to be fair and even-handed in how you lead your team, it’s easy to homogenize your people – to take a cookie-cutter approach to leading them. You try to give everyone equal time and support but, as we know, some people are a little… needier than others.

Don’t get me wrong, you have to treat everyone fairly. Otherwise, it can create a host of unintended consequences. But the principle of spending the most time with your stars is important to recognize, when almost everything around you is pushing you the other way. Even some of the most useful leadership models encourage you to spend more time with your weaker performers.

For example, Situational Leadership Theory, which I really like as a model, dictates that you should adapt your style to each individual based on their capability and maturity.

Each of the four styles (directing, selling, participating and delegating) implies a different level of involvement. The most directive style obviously requires a lot more time than the least directive style does, so it leads you back to spending more time with people who aren’t your superstars.

But if you ever need a compelling reason to change your approach, the Wall Street Journal article provides it. The author quotes research from McKinsey, which reached some startling conclusions. It found that the highest performers are 800% more productive than average performers in the same role.

You may have heard me say in the past that your high performers don’t give you 10% more than the average employee, they give you 200% more. But it looks like even that assessment massively underestimates their potential impact. Performance like this can radically change your outcomes.

Another critical finding is that 95% of a company’s value is delivered by only 5% of the people. The logic here is that there are very few roles that have the potential to deliver such big licks of value. Based on this, you should be constantly seeking to move your highest performers to the roles where they can have the greatest impacts.

Companies that reallocate high performers to the most critical roles on a quarterly basis were found to be more than twice as likely to outperform their direct competitors. Armed with these types of figures, do you think it might be worth paying really close attention to who your superstars are, and how you are utilizing them?

WHERE ARE ALL THESE SO-CALLED SUPERSTARS?

Everyone wants to build a high-performing team… many leaders claim to have built a high performing team… and a very small percentage of these leaders actually have built a high performing team.

You know that high performing teams start with high performing individuals, so it’s critical that you put time and energy into finding and keeping high performers. But in the war for talent, not every business can access the cream of crop. The talent you can attract depends on four key attributes:

1. Your industry. Take for example, the general domain of mechanical engineering. The top college graduates are much more likely to be attracted to jobs in, say, renewable energy than they are to fossil fuel energy. And when generic skills are able to be used across multiple industries, say, finance skills, top graduates tend to go where the money is. Some industries just pay better.
2. Your location. If your business operates in a major city center, then you have genuine access to a deep pool of talent. But if you’re running, say, a copper mine in the mountains of Argentina, you have to import talent in, which makes it harder. In countries that rely on the resources sector, as Australia does, many towns in remote areas were built specifically to support a local mine or a power station. This provides you with a natural (but very limited) talent pool.
3. Mobility of talent. Some roles that you have to fill require skills that are incredibly mobile, for example, finance, or IT, or truck driving. The resources sector has solved the problem to some extent by using FIFO workers – fly in, fly out. This enables them to fly workers in from a major city center, say, Sydney or Perth to work a shift based in a remote location. 10 days on / 8 days off would be a typical shift.It’s a tough life for the workers, but it can be beneficial to both parties. It allows the company to access talent they wouldn’t otherwise be able to get at, and it allows workers to earn wages they wouldn’t be able to in their home location. For example, a truck driver who could earn $120,000 in the city might be able to earn more than twice that as a FIFO worker at a remote mine site.

4. Your brand. Everyone wants to work for Google, right? If your brand isn’t highly recognizable and sought after, you’ll have to move to the back of the queue for talent along with everyone else. It’s best to think of the concept of high performers in relative terms. You’re looking to hire the best possible people from your available talent pool, and this of course is going to be largely determined by the four factors I’ve just mentioned.

THE TWO BIGGEST HIRING BARRIERS

There are two more barriers I want to mention because they play a crucial role in your ability to hire and retain superstars in your team.

The first barrier is that, unless you yourself are a strong confident leader, you may not intuitively be attracted to hiring the best employees. That sounds crazy, right!?

Jeffrey J. Fox in his awesome little book, How to Become a Great Boss, talks about the concept of 7s hiring 5s. Think about your hiring managers – the people below you in your company who you are allowing to bring talent into your organization. How do they rate on a scale from 1 to 10?

You’d better be careful here, because who you let do the hiring in your company makes a big difference. 7s higher 5s – this is probably subconscious, and there are good reasons for it.

5s are plentiful. They’re relatively cheap. They aren’t threatening to a 7, who can control them. And they won’t outshine their boss. And guess what? 5s higher 3s.

But 9s and 10s only want to hire 10s. They aren’t threatened by them. They want to hire people who are better than themselves. And they only want to work with other A players.

Don’t let weak leaders hire – they’ll just replicate a weaker version of themselves, and your capability will nosedive in the long term. This further limits your ability to select from an already constrained pool of talent. It’s also one of the best reasons I can think of to set really high standards for your leaders, so that only the best actually succeed.

If you lower that standard, it becomes a vicious circle, because those leaders will contribute to an ever-declining gene pool of talent.

The second impediment is even trickier. It’s your remuneration structures. A superstar employee might be 800% more productive than the average employee, but you clearly can’t pay them eight times the average salary!

Still, we all know in life that you get what you pay for, so you’ve got to be prepared to break the remuneration structures for someone who can really create value.

In my corporate career, I once paid a guy in a critical senior role that reported to me more than I was being paid myself. Why? Because I wanted the best… because the market for that role was very competitive at that time.. and because I knew that to attract the right person, that was just what I needed to do.

Of course, that’s not always going to be possible. But, if you remain a slave to the hierarchical remuneration structures that most companies have, you’ll be unlikely to compete with industries that can offer more reward flexibility.

Try to get a bit creative even if you can’t go outside the prescribed salary bands. Try to think of other ways to skin that cat, like: sign-on bonuses; or, retention bonuses; or, executive education and development opportunities.

Try anything that gives you leverage to bring on a superstar because, as we know, they are absolutely worth it.

FIVE TIPS FOR GETTING THE BEST FROM YOUR STARS 

All right, let’s look at my five tips to get the best from your stars.

1. Pay them above the odds. I know I’ve just spoken about this, but it’s such a critical point, and it should apply to non-leadership roles as well. When you have someone who’s exceptional in their field, don’t be afraid to make it worth their while to join, to stay, and to contribute.You may need to be a bit creative, and if you’re not at the very top of your company, you’ll probably need to fight for your superstar’s compensation.

2. Re-craft the role to maximize their value. We hire people with the expectation that they can fulfill a predefined, specific role. And of course, this is entirely reasonable. Your superstars will often tell you how they can create more value. So, make sure you listen to them and keep your eyes open – when you see areas that they’re particularly strong, you can adapt their role to utilize their superpowers to the greatest extent possible.You have to hire someone who can do the job that you need to get done, but you also have to look at ways to expand and redefine their role so that you can extract the most value from them that you possibly can.

3. Move your superstars around to align them to the highest value work. For me, this was one of the most interesting findings from the McKinsey research. We tend to put people in roles and leave them there until they get promoted… but your superstars should be much more mobile. Imagine if you could move them to a different role once or twice a year, and align their efforts with the company’s biggest value levers.We tend to think in terms of skills and structures, so I’m still trying to wrap my head around how it might work in practice, in different sized companies. But if you could achieve this, imagine the upside you could create!?

4. Help your superstars to achieve their career objectives. Every superstar is ambitious – no exceptions. It’s important that you know what drives them, and what their career objectives are. Regardless of whether or not you have internal opportunities, you should always be looking to develop your people for their next role, even if it’s not with you. They will absolutely appreciate that and it garners a lot of loyalty.A focus on your superstars’ future is going to ensure that you get the best from them for as long as they’re with you.

5. Maximize autonomy. Your superstars don’t need babysitting. They need guidance, and they need an intelligent sounding board. This is why you should aim to spend as much time as you sensibly can with your superstars. When I say “sensibly”, I mean in a way that adds value to them, without becoming a drain on their productivity.It’s important to know them well enough to work out how far you can stretch them. With your superstar performers, this requires the sophisticated application of a very simple tool that you should already be familiar with: the Challenge, Coach, Confront framework.

DON’T WASTE YOUR EXCEPTIONAL TALENT

If you are lucky enough to hire a superstar, you need to think really hard about how you can lead them to create the most value.

Superstars are the foundation of any high-performing team. They’re living examples of the kind of performance and attitude that you’re trying to instill into every team member. It’s so much easier to set a standard when you have someone in your orbit who massively exceeds that standard every single day.

If you just slot your star performers into their role, and treat them the same as your average employees, then you’ll never tap into that potential 800% productivity multiplier. Make sure you understand your hiring constraints both external and internal, and remove as many of them as you can. You need to give yourself the best chance possible of scooping the top of your available talent pool.

Any superstar you hire brings with them a set of unique leadership challenges. They are strong-willed and their driven for success… but the outcomes they produce are worth every moment of heartache.