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When it comes to supporting the development of your team, different employees at different levels of performance require different methods of support.
In regards to top performers, many managers make the mistake of doing too little. The thought in being hands-off seems to be that the employee is performing so well on their own that it's best to simply get out of their way and let them do their thing.
While there is some benefit to that approach, a more effective method includes a little more nuance. Here's just a few ways to support your superstars more effectively…
Prepare to lose them
This sounds like an odd place to start, but we are going to eventually lose our top performers to new and exciting opportunities. This is good and is the natural order of things. Good leaders don't prevent the growth of their team in order to selfishly retain talent.
When you support your top performers in this way enough times, you'll gain a reputation for it. Then you have top performers in the organization trying to get on your team. That's a beautiful thing.
Understand them
Next you need to understand two things about your employees. What are their strengths and what are their career goals? This actually applies for developing any of your employees but it is even more relevant for your top performers.
Since we are talking about top performers, their strengths are likely very apparent and easy to identify. We need to keep these in mind because we want to help the employee leverage those strengths to broaden their positive impact to the organization.
Their career goals are also important. Because they are a top performer, one of the ways we can reward them is by championing their career aspirations.
Reward & recognize them
The obvious means of rewarding top performers is through pay, bonuses and incentives. While you should be rewarding your top performers this way, there are other things you should also consider doing to supplement these rewards.
Formal recognition and praise is an easy place to start. Understand how the individual likes to be recognized (publicly vs privately) and then do so regularly.
You can also consider small one-time gifts, special assignments (more on that below) and opportunities to attend industry training and conferences if they're interested.
Challenge Them
Make sure that you are giving top performers work that will provide some challenge. Challenging work can help with motivation and engagement and this is especially true for high performers.
This is where a lot of managers make a mistake. They challenge the top performer with a larger volume of their normal work. The art to challenging work is to ensure it is also interesting and is not likely to cause unnecessary stress.
Again, knowing your staff well helps here. Consider having them mentor others if they are strong relationship builders. Or consider assigning them to interesting projects. Giving them more flexibility with what else they spend their focus on is another way of rewarding performance.
Give them space
As I suggested in the beginning, there is some value in the "get out of their way" approach. Most people appreciate a good deal of autonomy in their jobs and we recommend you give it to them.
Communicate the guard-rails and must-haves of a project but them leave them to approach it however they see fit. This will be good for their both their motivation and their development.
This Week's Action Items:
Focus your mindset on developing top performers, not collecting them.
Take the time to understand what makes all your staff tick.
Reward and recognize your top performers regularly and through diverse means.
Ensure their work is simultaneously interesting and slightly challenging.
Let them know that you trust them to handle projects and assignments in their own way (within reason).
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