Managing High Performers | Stay SaaSy

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08 May 2024

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Management advice often includes guidance on managing low performance. There is less written about managing high performance.

This disparity exists for two reasons:

High performance is less common than low performance, because high performers usually get promoted into positions with higher expectations. Underperformance is in every role; high performance gets leveled-up into expectation-meeting performance.

Most managers mismanage high performers. In fact, most managers don’t really manage them at all. So, there are fewer managers who know how to manage high performers, let alone managers to write about it.

What follows is our main advice for managing high performers.

Manage Them!

Weak managers let high performing reports do whatever they want. Even the best performers need structure and guidance - a coach. Without coaching, high performers can meet all sorts of suboptimal fates, like:

Not meeting their potential. Even a passive observer can help someone improve. But good coaches do more - they help high performers reach new levels.

Some high performers go unmanaged for so long that they work themselves into a role that has no real responsibility - they just float around and help people. There’s nothing sadder than a capable person with no real responsibility.

So if you’ve got a high performer - manage them! Make sure they drive the big wins. Identify places for improvement.

Most high performers go unmanaged either because their managers are intimidated or just don’t know how.

You shouldn’t be intimidated because you’re not as skilled as your high performer. Even Tiger Woods has a coach, and he is definitely a better golfer than his own coach. Doing and coaching are two separate skills; you can help someone improve without being better than them.

People inevitably hit a ceiling, and you need to be there to coach them through it, no matter how spectacular their skills

Don’t take them for granted

High performers can often make your life much easier and handle all sorts of problems. If you forget about them while you’re dealing with other problems, however, you’ll wake up one day to find their resignation letter. This is one of the ways for you yourself to become a low performer.

The single most important activity to do with your high performer is career planning. Know where they want to go and help them get there. If you saddle them with mess after mess to fix without a path to greater things, even if you pay them well, you’ll lose the truly ambitious high performer who feels uninvested-in and directionless.

Set clear expectations

High performers should be getting paid more than others and should have much higher expectations. Managers often miss this nuance and, for example, are not comfortable giving a high performer anything but the maximum score on a performance review. How can our best person be at expectations? Well, if you pay them way more than everyone you’d expect them to be better than everyone else.

Most organizations and managers are quite good at performance managing people who are doing nothing, or close to nothing. Very few organizations are good at the gradated set of expectations above that, especially differentiated between great and greater.

Many career ladders try to solve this by having titles gradate with spans of control - they’re responsible for more people and stuff, so clearly they’re doing more, right? Not really. Some people are responsible for 40 people that would do amazing without them. Some people are responsible for 10 people who would fall apart without them. Spans of control are not entirely sufficient to judge performance.

You need to articulate differentiated expectations for high performers, not just about what their area of ownership will produce, but what they will actually do. Expect a lot and let your high performers know it.

Do give critical feedback to high performers

Weak managers often avoid giving feedback to high performers, either because they don’t know what to say, or, worse, because they fear that if they give critical feedback the high performer will turn around and start criticizing them.

This is a mistake. If you’re managing a high performer, you must be willing to give them feedback when necessary. If you don’t know how to say it, ask for help. Like in any performance situation, delaying things only makes it worse - you dig the hole deeper, and leave people asking why you didn’t tell them sooner.

Do pay them unreasonably

Some people get uncomfortable paying the best people way more than average. Pay people what they’re worth, even if that’s a lot, even if that’s more than what you make. At many companies the top sales rep at a company often makes more cash than the CRO.

Sometimes people get afraid that this will cause problems if the information gets out. In reality it is actually the opposite - if it’s known that top performers...