Think about the top performers in your organization. Do you really know what makes them tick?
High-potential and high-performing employees are motivated by a unique set of experiences and rewards that have been identified by the authors of a significant study appearing in the May 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review.
Understanding what keeps star employees from leaving will prevent the significant brain drain that always accompanies an economic recovery cycle.
Why do they give 110%?
One very common mistake that corporate leaders tend to make is the assumption that everyone values the same things to the same degree. Equity or cash? Flex-time or four 10-hour workdays? And why doesn’t everyone love the new on-site doggie daycare??
The fact is that we will never know all the reasons why the average employee chooses to lend his energy to certain organizations and not to others. But superstar employees are not “average” and we certainly should not treat them as such.
Authors Jean Martin and Conrad Schmidt, along with their team at the Corporate Leadership Council, studied 20,000 high-potential employees in 100 organizations around the world over six years.* They uncovered the patterns that some of the world’s best companies are already addressing.
The results may or may not surprise you, but know this: the war for talent is just beginning. Ignore it at your peril. What motivates “everyone” doesn’t necessarily inspire the people who we really really want to keep.
Figuring out what makes high-potential employees tick is complicated by the fact that there are generational differences at play. Yesterday’s high-potentials were different from today’s high-potentials; and what about the Millennials?
Step 1: We need to ask them and be ready for some challenging answers.
What did the Corporate Leadership Council discover about “emerging stars”?
1. Recognition is much more important than it used to be. Do it early and often.
2. Explicitly link individual goals to corporate objectives.
3. Get them involved in solving your organization’s most challenging problems.
Generally speaking, our best employees want to make a difference and be rewarded for it. What a great concept!
One-size-fits-all, egalitarian compensation and reward programs are de-motivating for top performers. They do not want to do average work or be regarded as average contributors.
Let’s look at #2 above. Linking individual goals to corporate objectives is not as simple as creating a performance appraisal template with the first five entries pre-written.
We need to understand personal and professional goals and then offer experiences and skill-building opportunities that connect them to the bigger picture in the organization.
Johnson & Johnson’s LeAD program for high-potentials provides regular assessments and coaching from an outside firm. “The company has found that when top talent is seen as a critical organizational asset…the [high-potentials’] ability and willingness to contribute to the firm dramatically increases.”
The study also found that 25% of the highest-potential employees intend to jump ship within the year, and 70% of all high-potentials lack the critical skills necessary to succeed at higher levels in their organizations.
This is a serious problem with tremendous implications for the future. Suddenly professional development becomes a high ROI proposition when [limited] salary and bonus dollars alone will not provide the long-term connection to organizational performance that the high-potential employee now seeks.
Developing a meaningful program for retaining your star employees will take work, but several very successful companies like Johnson & Johnson, Proctor & Gamble, H-P, and Novartis have made it their priority as the economy begins to offer greener pastures in a multitude of locations now more easily accessible to motivated employees.
* From “How to Keep Your Top Talent” (Harvard Business Review, May 2010, pgs. 54-61)