How to Supercharge Your Overperformers
In a perfect world, we’d all have teams of people working together in the same direction towards the same goals at their full potential all the time. But we live in the real world where that never happens.
Teams have A players and B players and sometimes C or D players, suffer from miscommunication, and can work at cross purposes, among a sea of other factors that can snag processes and stall growth. Given these real world dynamics, you’ve got to know where to put your resources to unleash the most productivity, creativity, and efficiency from your team.
One of the fastest, most surefire ways to do that? Look to your overperformers — those people committed to excellence in their roles and for the organization, and who are able to harness it for change or stability (superstars and rockstars, respectively).
If you didn’t know that, you can stop there and this article will be a win for your organization. But we promised our take on how to do this in the title as well, so here we go…
Find Them
Some overperformers are easy to identify (especially those who apply their talents to change). Others might be keeping a lower profile, and it’s worth searching them out. They come in different flavors (workhorses, multipliers, free-thinkers, spreadsheet wizards…). The point is that, having identified your highest performers, you want to give them jetpacks — and the freedom and encouragement to use them.
But, we frequently find ourselves gearing our decisions, our policies, and our attention to B- or C-players. Ask any manager if they spend more of their time dealing with high performers or low performers and the answer is typically that they focus on the low end. This is backwards. Your investments in high performers are more likely to be high leverage – taking a 2x performer to a 5x – than trying to get a below average performer to just get up to par. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we can take the advice to “just get out of the way” of our best employees a little too far and end up ignoring them entirely.
No, ruthlessly seek them out through a regular identification process (we’ve heard of some managers leading mock drafts of the entire employee base every quarter to see who goes in the first round) and then…
Align Incentives
Well-designed incentives harness and direct energy for the benefit of the organization, the team, and the individual employee. And, employees need to be able to see how that alignment works — that overperformers are rewarded for their hard work and encouraged to continue to go above and beyond. This means tying rewards to performance and creating a culture that values and recognizes exceptional work and outstanding results. (Some managers worry that such incentive systems or praise — see below — for high performers will cause resentment in other employees. And, this may be the case. One solution? Emphasize the upside for the team.)
Let Them Lead
Overperformers thrive in environments that allow them to focus on their work without being bogged down by unnecessary bureaucracy. This also extends to policies and procedures that hamstring their efforts. Giving high performers an environment that allows them to focus on what they do best sounds a little like leaving them alone to get on with it (discussed above). But there’s nuance here, and proactively creating space for their commitment to excellence to thrive is the opposite of ignoring them. It means paying enough attention to know what’s getting in the way of them doing their best work, putting in the leg work to make sure they don’t stumble on things that aren’t their highest and best use, and thinking deeply and collaboratively about how a task or project will help them grow.
Overperformers also tend to thrive in organizations that are transparent and open. By creating a culture of transparency, you can foster an environment that supports overperformers and encourages them to continue to go above and beyond. A commitment to a certain level of transparency (the level of openness is negotiable, honesty is not) can also help relieve some of the pressure and reduce the stakes of failure.
Say Thank You
Everybody deserves to have their work acknowledged, particularly when they’re overperforming expectations. And, the fact is that many overperformers overperform in the first place because they’re chasing praise. We’re all human, and messy. You should do it anyway, but if your A-players are motivated by recognition, prioritize sincerely and personally acknowledging their work and the impact it has on the business.
By thoughtfully investing time, energy, and resources in your A players, rather than managing to the middle, you’re going to get the most out of the people most likely to love what they do and stay with your organization as it scales. That not only raises your ceiling but, when done right, can help raise the floor, too.
