How to Attract High-Performance Employees

By Vic Downing

© Vic Downing March 2007

1. Run a first-class operation.
2. Be squeaky-clean.
3. Get rid of your best people.
4. Lead people not employees.

Reputation.

High-performance employees are drawn to leaders with exceptional reputations like metal fragments are drawn to a magnet. Yes, the pay and benefits must be within a competitive range… but it is your reputation—even more than dollars and prestige—that wins the day with the people you most want on your team. Your sterling reputation is far more likely to give you a steady supply of high-performance people than a best-deal salary and benefit package or the concerted efforts of an expensive recruiter.

High-performance people find and “hire” their next boss by working their personal networks. What they discover while working their networks is your reputation. 62.5% percent of high performance employees—both managers and non-managers—said that “working their networks” is the best way to find that next, desirable position. This choice towers over Internet-based services like Monster.com (2.3%), the company website (3.4%), and even one’s career coach/mentor/recruiter (31.8%). If your “rep” is sterling, the good people will find you. If your “rep” is O.K., your name won’t make the shortlist.

Our research points to four ways to build and protect your reputation:

1. Run a first-class operation.
2. Be squeaky-clean.
3. Get rid of your best people.
4. Lead people not employees.

Your job is to continuously perform in ways that build and protect that reputation within those networks. The following paragraphs give detailed suggestions and data for building and protecting your reputation.

1. Run a First-Class Operation

The people you want most to hire expect you to be competent relative to your team’s work. If you don’t “know the business” and can’t ferret out the fluff from the facts in presentations and reports, then you aren’t in the running.

High-performance people find and “hire” their next boss by working their personal networks. What they discover while working their networks is your reputation.

Assuming competence, high-performance employees are looking for a boss who:

1. Leads well (i.e., knows where the team is going, keeps everyone on track, is optimistic and realistic)
2. Is a good career coach mentor
3. Is an excellent example of integrity at work
4. Provides an opportunity to learn and experience what’s needed most to make that next career move

Each of these items is worthy of an article or a book. Here are a few, excellent choices: Winning by Welch, Good to Great by Collins, and Magnetic Leadership: Are You a Good Enough Leader to Be Hired By the Best Employees? by Downing. (You can purchase Magnetic Leadership here).

Nice-to-Have’s But Not Necessities:

• Providing more money or benefits than competitors
• Being a handy stepping-stone to the next job
• Being politically well connected
• The opportunity to work with people who demonstrate what needs to be learned to make the next career move
• The opportunity to work for a company that has a product or service that is excellent and of real value

There is simply no substitute for leading a team that does what it says it’s going to do, plays by the rules, treats employees like people, and is led by a person who knows what’s going on… but not many do it.

2. Be Squeaky-Clean

Being beyond-reproach and being perceived as being beyond reproach are—hands down—the most important parts of your reputation.

When individual contributors and managers were asked, “What factors most persuade you to leave an employer?” the #1 factor was, “I suspect or know for certain that the leaders at my current employer are unethical or lack integrity.”

44.3% of respondents made this as their #1 reason, far outnumbering the 14.8% who ranked the next most popular reason as #1. And, incidentally, this next most popular reason for leaving an employer was, “If I stay with my current employer, my quality of life-apart-from-work (i.e., my health, my leisure time, my family, et cetera) will suffer.” Your damaged integrity is (for most high performers) a more powerful repellant than the negative impact of work on quality of life!

44.3% of respondents put “lack of leader’s integrity” as the #1 reason to consider leaving an employer.

When asked, “What factors most persuade you to stay with an employer when you have an attractive offer from a different employer?”, the answers were similar. 25% cited the integrity of leaders, 22.7% cited the beneficial impact of the work on family, health, and life-apart-from-work, and 21.6% cited the provision of training/education that would advance one’s career. Surprisingly, “…money and/or the benefits (i.e., education, medical, et cetera) I get here are better than the alternatives” was a first-choice of only 9.1% of high-performance professionals.

Your reputation and your ability to attract the best people can be impacted as much by the ethics of leaders around you as they are impact by your own ethics. Adopting the Naval Academy Code of Honor may not be a bad idea: Don’t lie, cheat, or steal, and don’t tolerate those who do.

3. Get Rid of Your Best People

This, to say the least, is counter-intuitive!

When asked, “When you consider several employment opportunities outside of your current employer, what is the single most important factor?” 37.9% of managers and individuals chose, “The opportunity for me to develop professionally.”

The opportunity to develop professionally is more important to most high-performers than quality of life, cultural fit, money, the reputation of the company, or the company’s growth potential (at 23%, 19.5%, 8%, 6.9%, and 4.6% respectively). Look at it from your high-performer’s perspective: “If there is no opportunity to develop as a member of your team because all the positions are filled and are likely to stay filled for a good long time, then why join up?”

Everything in you wants to hang on to high-performing team members, but if you do that for too long, expect your supply of new, high-performance employees to dry-up.

Here’s a metaphor that may help: Look at the people on your team like water rushing through a hydro-electric dam… lots of movement and lots of energy!

4. Lead People Not Employees

“Life-apart-from-work” is not the most important criteria for career decision-making among high-performance people… but it is a close second in a number of categories.

More than twenty-five years of observing teams at work leads me to believe that although most high-performers don’t select positions because of the positive impact on their non-work lives, they will—sooner or later—“suddenly” leave otherwise very desirable positions if their non-work life suffers severely. Some of the data points to this: “Life-apart-from-work” only narrowly trails leadership integrity as the #1 factor causing one to stay with an employer, and a whopping 57.5% put “life-apart-from-work” in their top 3 reasons (out of 7) to consider leaving one’s employer.

In my experience, it is very unusual to see high-performers undermine their at-home lives if those high-performers work for bosses who have rewarding, rejuvenating at-home lives. Put simply: people believe what they see far sooner than they believe what they are told. When they see you building and protecting your at-home life, they quickly come to the conclusion that you will not sacrifice their at-home lives for the sake of the company. With this in mind, one of the best things you can do to attract a high-performance person is to develop and protect your at-home life.

Look at the people on your team like water rushing through a hydro-electric dam… lots of movement and lots of energy!

Leaders of high-performance people view the burnout of their people as their own leadership failure. If you want to attract high-performance people, run a first class operation (see above). First class operations are not characterized by fire fighting, heroics, and burning the candle at both ends. High-performance leaders make thorough assessments of accountabilities before they are undertaken, create and attend to performance indicators frequently enough to spot problems early, and protect their people from burn-out by hiring high-performance people and not tolerating people who are “retired in place.” These are the leaders whose people can make heroic efforts (on occasion) without imperiling their at-home lives.

Third, leaders who attract high-performance people make it easy and normal to bring home to work. They do this by letting their life-apart-from-work become a part of life-at-work. People on their teams “know” these leaders: their values, hobbies, a little bit about their history, maybe even something about their families. Also, these leaders have a life-apart-from-work: they take their vacations, “get serious” about their fly fishing or cooking or quilting or baseball, let calls from family interrupt “important” meetings, and they usually have something interesting to say when a colleague asks, “So, what did you do this weekend?” As a result, high-performance people feel “at-home” talking about something other than work when they are at work… and that makes it far more likely that they see work as the principal way of protecting and growing the at-home part of their lives.

Leaders who lead people instead of employees get more than headcount… they get enthusiasm, genius, humor, endurance, personal integrity, and exceptional performance.

About The Data

This article is based on a survey sponsored by Global Advantage, Inc. in August-September 2006. The unique feature of the survey is that only high-performance persons were invited to take the survey.

“High Performance Employee” is defined as a person who consistently achieves all of his/her accountabilities and consistently exceeds some of those accountabilities.

If you would like to look at the detailed responses to this survey please contact us.

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