Is your company a place where highly talented and driven people can thrive, or are high performers limited by a lack of direction, opportunities, and feedback? When A-players sense that they’ve hit a ceiling, they’re more likely take their skills and abilities elsewhere. Here are the four things you need to ensure you’re keeping your high performers engaged.
Crystal Clear Performance Objectives
High achievers like success. To obtain success, they must know what success looks like. Performance objectives lay out exactly what outcomes and expectations an employee is responsible for.
Without any goal, target, or metric around performance, your people will begin to feel like they’re floating lost at sea. Clarity surrounding performance objectives motivates and removes the stress that comes with not knowing what your purpose is at work.
Multiple Career Pathways
A one-way-fits-all approach to career development has expired in the modern workplace. People have different strengths and desires for their careers. Now more than ever, employees will seek out new opportunities if their organization doesn’t prioritize their expanding career interests.
Can you create a new position based on an employee’s strengths? Keeping an open and flexible mind could retain your high achievers and get them in a seat where they can really shine. Visualize career pathways as a lattice rather than a line. (We take a deeper dive into this here.)
A Clear Development Trajectory
In addition to multiple career pathways, highly driven individuals will want a clear path toward their desired position in the company. What competencies do they need to get from their current seat to their desired or goal seat, and how can they acquire those?
This is where, if you’re serious about retaining top performers, you’ll need a healthy amount of resources devoted to different development opportunities. Keep your highly driven people by educating and developing their skills so that they can reach their next milestone.
Continual Coaching
It’s commonly said that people don’t leave their jobs, they leave their bosses. High performers need rich touchpoints and coaching conversations with their leaders. Feedback keeps high performers remain motivated and engaged.
Feedback also provides clarity on exactly what they need to do to improve their performance. At Etho, we’re kind of obsessed with feedback and coaching. So much so that we created an all-in-one platform for people, meetings, and progress. Etho is easy-to-use with a full suite of tools to help you create deeply connected, high-performing organizations. Want to see Etho in action? Schedule a demo today!
To recap, high performers need to know what they’re currently responsible for, what their career possibilities are, opportunities to hone necessary competencies, and continual coaching. Retain your A-players by giving them these four things.
