5 Ways to Keep Your Best People

Can you keep your best people from walking out the door?

Shy of barricading the door, probably not.

But you can create a workplace where your best people want to stay.

The key: Start focusing more on retaining the top performers and less on controlling low performers. That’s the jist of research from Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor, co-authors of Primed to Perform: How to Build the Highest Performing Cultures Through the Science of Total Motivation.

“For many reasons … many companies build cultures that are focused on controlling the output of low performers, rather than growing and unlocking everyone’s skills,” the authors say. “Organizations need to build cultures that are obsessed with high performers, focusing the culture on keeping high performers and making new ones.”

Keep Your Best People (& Others)

OK, OK, we won’t advocate that you get rid of all other performers. Quite honestly, you need steady performers. They keep departments and companies afloat by doing what needs to be done.

And those underperformers? They make up just about 5% of the working population, according to Culture Amp data. So leaders don’t want to spend much more than 5% of their time trying to improve their performance.

Instead, this story is about doing what’s necessary to keep your best people happy and on the job.

Here are five tactics:

1. Cut their Meetings

First key in creating a culture where high performers thrive: Get them the hell out of so many meetings.

Cut down on meetings to free up your best people’s time for work that makes a difference. Establish a simple, predictable weekly meeting schedule for the team.

The researchers suggested this cadence:

• Prioritization Monday to align strategy
• Problem-solving Wednesday to discuss challenges (or skip if there aren’t any), and
• Pencils-down Friday to review completed work, share feedback and align on next steps.

2. Do Better One-on-Ones

While we’re on meetings, let’s talk about one-on-ones and how to make them better for people who already perform well.

They aren’t as necessary as you might think. Good performers often see them as a roadblock to doing their work. They don’t want to analyze what they’re doing. They want to do it.

So talk with top performers to find out how often they want to meet and the kind of feedback they desire. Then custom design those meetings.

3. Measure Motivation

Top performers aren’t always self-motivated. They hit ruts. They have highs. They go through lulls.

You want to use surveys to assess everyone’s motivation and understand what excites them — and what creates stress. And you want to do this regularly because if you’ve been a leader/parent/child/human long enough, you know these things change over time.

The researchers suggest these questions:

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

4. Be a Mentor

Flip the switch on performance reviews. Instead of focusing on past results — and looking for failures so you have something to mark — focus on advice for development and growth.

Anchor the conversation around concrete skills to improve their performance even more, increase their stock and help their career.

“This shifts the mindset from evaluation on past actions to learning for the future,” the authors said.

Try to find one concrete, high-leverage skill — such as problem-solving, leadership or emotional intelligence — for them to improve in the next quarter. Then give them resources and time to pursue that.

5. Give Them Wings & Roots

If you’ve never heard this mantra, it’s about giving people a strong sense of self and belonging, plus the ability to spread their wings and fly to new things. That’s exactly how you want to treat high performers.

Remind them regularly of your confidence in their abilities to make good decisions and get things done well. Encourage them to take calculated risks and try new things to do even better work. Then step back, and don’t micromanage.