systematicHR

So who is your top talent? Basically it’s those few people who feel like they don’t really work all that hard to out produce 95% of your workforce. That’s of course a simple definition, but this group of people are not just more efficient at what they do, they are much more effective. It’s because they have a better ability to grasp their subject matter, push the envelope with new ideas about how to do the work and find better ways to make the work more meaningful for their customers. Often, they actually do work very hard and instead of outperforming their peers hour for hour, they can outperform entire departments.

There are a couple major types of burnout for your top talent. The first is boredom. The second is disengagement. These are both serious problems in your need to keep your talent, and they are events you can expect in all your most talented employees.

Harvard Business Review’s article “Crisis at the Summit” ((Parsons, George, March 2007. “Crisis at the Summit.” Harvard Business Review. Retrived from http://www.hbr.com.)) identifies the phases of the employee growth curve and the symptoms of the “crisis.” They call these phases Ascending, Approaching, Plateauing, and Descending. As HR professionals, we’ve all seen people in each of these phases of work-life. Ascending is always the most fun. In that phase, employees are learning, with all the excitement of where they have to go and learn. Approaching is that phase of mastery where these employees become intellectual leaders in their space. This is often where some self doubt sets in as they wonder what’s next. Plateauing however is where the doubt really hits home as the employee’s career direction is cast into doubt. The descent is truly about disengagement, and the lack of interest in the work or the company. If you can, check out HRB’s very detailed description of these phases and the indicators of each.

You’ll note that the key to keeping the top talent motivated is not in how well you structure your total compensation, or how effectively you run your performance process to ensure continued growth. The key to top talent is in interesting work that leads to new opportunities for learning. Notice that this isn’t simply more training and learning management. Your top talent will instinctively and naturally be drawn to learning new skills and concepts when the opportunities are presented to them. What really upsets your top talent is that they know they are the best, yet when they are blocked by management (often because of “turf”) their opportunities are taken away.

When it comes to top talent, there’s a hierarchy in talent management. If performance and compensation processes are not so important, and succession management addresses career advancement but not intellectual growth, then perhaps we’ve overlooked something major – changing how our managers relate to talent, and ensuring a collaborative culture that exposes talent to wider ranges of possibilities.