Managing Top Performers: How to Mentor Your Best Employees

November 2, 2018 Employee Performance and Coaching, How To, Performance Reviews, The Manager's Resource Handbook

A Formula for Giving Performance Feedback to Our Most Talented Workers

When I first became a manager of other people, I was deathly afraid of having to deal with performance issues and difficult employees. And while it took a little time to figure out how to manage those individuals, it was not until I sat down with my best employee for the first time that I realized how much harder it was to give feedback to top performers. It sounds strange, but think about it: what do you tell your best employee who does everything right? How do you give them feedback on their performance when you cannot recall a single mistake they made? I remember holding that performance review well, and feeling like a complete idiot at the end of it. I recall thinking to myself “How did I screw this up? I had nothing to say.” Mentoring and coaching high performing employees is far more difficult than we might think because there are simply fewer mistakes to highlight as examples of areas of improvement. And yet, after a year of dedication and hard work, great employees still want feedback and deserve the best of our mentoring abilities. With that, let’s take a closer look at how to give performance feedback to our top employees.

The Classic Formula for Giving Employees Feedback

The general school of thought behind giving feedback to employees is rooted in the idea that there are mistakes and missteps that need to be corrected. By correcting or addressing those mistakes, the employee will improve as a result. (We can debate if this is a good approach or not, but let’s assume it is for the purposes of our discussion).

While this may be a suitable formula for average workers as well as your underperforming staff, it does not work for your top talent because, well, they rarely make mistakes! Thus, when managing and coaching your best employees, you need to shift your own mindset away from that typical sequence of “highlight mistakes, motivate them to do better. Rinse and repeat.”

Who Are My Top Performers? … Ask Yourself:
Who are the employees you always go to when the stakes are high?
Which employees go above and beyond, every time?
When an employee asks for help from a peer, who do they seek out?
Who do YOU consult for input on important decisions?
Who are the employees you never worry about when it comes to meeting a deadline?
Whose departure from your team would represent the biggest loss?

The Formula for Managing Top Performers

High performing employees are hard-working and talented. They know when they make mistakes and they are usually their harshest critics. They are driven. They want to be good at what they do. And oddly enough, they do not take their own performance for granted. When mentoring and coaching these top-notch employees, your challenge as their manager is to help them reflect upon their performance and to add thoughtful perspective that they have not already realized themselves. To create structure for the performance review, here is an 8-step formula for giving feedback to your best employees.

1. Highlight Any Mistakes…For the Sake of Formality

While the classical feedback formula rarely applies to your top talent, start out in the traditional way. Highlight to your employee any notable issues, mistakes, or errors you saw in their performance, even if this is a very limited set of information. Be open, be honest. More often than not, they are already aware of any issue you may raise and have learned from it. Still, take a few moments to discuss and ask what they learned from those handful of blemishes in an otherwise impeccable year. Even if the points seem minor and petty, they help keep the discussion real and your employee will appreciate the fact that you were paying attention.

2. Encourage Them to Do MORE of What They Do Best

Next, continuing in the spirit of giving feedback, highlight to your employee those things they did really well over the course of the year. High performers always value the feedback. Unlike the typical performance review in which you identify mistakes as learning opportunities, for high performers, it’s about focusing on the successes they may have overlooked. By helping them realize the things they do well, it provides them with valuable insight about their strengths. Not only should you share your observations, but further, encourage your employees to leverage those strengths and do more of them. For example, are they good mentors to junior staff? Encourage them to take a more prominent role in guiding the team. Are they especially good at paying attention to the details? Perhaps they can lead an internal effort to develop some quality control standards that the entire department uses. Help them leverage their unique strengths and qualities as a way of furthering their success.

3. Ask How They Are Doing … Otherwise

In the next step of the formula, shift the discussion entirely and ask the employee how he or she is really doing. Do they feel they did a good job that year? Do they feel they have enough support from you and their peers? Do they feel like they are even part of a team (surprisingly, sometimes they do not)? Take some time to just have an honest conversation, almost like you would have with an old friend. Let the employee do the talking. Prompt them with questions. The purpose here is for you to look for indications of difficulties or frustrations they may be dealing with.

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4. Next, Focus on Learning and Development

Top performing employees want to succeed, and learning is a big part of both their personal and professional interest. They want to learn and find ways to improve, if for no one else’s sake but their own. Take time to ask the employee if they feel like they are still learning in their role, and further, what it is they are learning. Additionally, share your perspective on any learning aspects you may have observed. In other words, what examples of how they improved over the past 12 months have you noticed?

5. Push Them Outside Their Comfort Zone with a Development Assignment

Even our best staffers have their limits. As part of the performance review and coaching session, you can further their development by pushing them outside their comfort zones. Are they highly effective at doing their job but do not like the policies they have to follow? Challenge and encourage them to improve the process. Do they struggle in front of a big crowd? Give them a few small assignments to increase their comfort with public speaking. The objective here is simply to broaden their exposure, as a vehicle for teaching them new skills. Recognize, though, that pushing him or her outside their comfort zone does not always end in success. Sometimes it is just to test the limits of their abilities.

6. Investigate Their Level of Interest in Their Current Role

When talented employees stop learning, they often grow dissatisfied with their jobs and crave something else. Explore the employee’s continued interest in what they are doing. Deliberately ask them if they are still interested in their work and assignments, or if he or she needs some other source of inspiration. If they feel they are no longer learning and are hungry for something new, make sure they understand they can speak freely about their career interests with you – many employees worry about expressing job dissatisfaction with their current boss. It’s better to move a talented worker within your organization than to lose them to another one altogether.

7. Revisit Long Term Goals

Unlike some employees, one of the magical things about having top-talent on your team is the fact that they think about their long-term goals often. While many employees struggle to see far down the road, motived talent thinks about their long-term plans fairly frequently. Even if they do not have a long-term destination for their career, they still ponder the answer to the question, searching for what feels right. If they are unsure, a great starter ask them whose current job they’d really like to have someday. When you sit down for a performance review, discuss their long-term interests and help them carve out paths to get there.

“After a year of dedication and hard work, great employees still want feedback and deserve the best of our mentoring abilities.”

8. Help Them Reach Their Goals

No manager likes losing good employees. But everyone has their goals and ambitions. Keep in mind it is always better to retain talented employees somewhere in your organization, rather than have them leave the business entirely. If you get the sense that one of your best employees is feeling the urge for something new or that they are ready to move on, go out of your way to help them find another role in your organization if possible. Don’t be afraid to ask if there are any other roles in the organization that may interest them.

Mentoring Your Top Talent

When all is said and done, managing high performers is actually quite challenging because their needs are different and traditional managerial methods for conducting performance evaluations are ineffective. Further, the high-impact employee’s ability to consistently deliver results can make it hard for us as managers to provide them with constructive feedback and input that encourages development. Of most importance in your role, though, is to find ways to continue pushing their growth and learning. Using this simple formula we have outlined here will help give your best employees valuable input and feedback. Who knows, maybe you’ll find yourself working for them someday.