Why do Top Performers Leave Their Jobs?

Why do top performers leave their current jobs? Can you predict turnover? As it turns out, research shows you can.

We interview thousands of people every year. And as I go through the candidate interview notes, certain themes emerge again and again. There are four factors that predict employee turnover and I’ve posted them over at The Washington Business Journal.

Want Better Hiring Results? Shift Your Perspective

“If we’re paying a search fee, then I expect to find someone who can really ‘wow’ me,” the Director told me in my morning meeting. “I’m not going to settle.”

Later than day I met with another client to discuss their new search. The COO was explaining her expectations, “I want to see qualified candidates from a variety of backgrounds, so we can compare them.” She outlined how her very stable team would benefit by including new people with diverse perspectives.

The simple act of paying a search fee dramatically raised the expectations of both hiring managers.

Think about that for a moment.

When you post an ad on a job board, you hope to get someone good.  That’s your hope, but you’ve learned not to expect much. When you “industrialize the hiring process” (like posting ads, letting HR process the responses, and only interviewing the people who happened to notice the ad, and who took the trouble to apply) your hiring managers know they should lower their expectations. And when you lower the caliber of people you hire, you are forced to spend more time managing average people.

Alternatively, when you invest more effort in your hiring process (either by investing in your internal recruiting process, or by engaging a search firm), you come to expect more .. so you end up hiring more exceptional people, and getting higher productivity with less management effort.  (Managing high performers is not easy, but it’s far less exhausting than managing low performers).

When you pay a search fee, you feel like your money would be wasted if you only saw people who were good–you want someone great. In fact, you don’t just want someone great, you want to know you hired the best possible person, so you expect to interview people from a variety of backgrounds. This diverse outside perspective helps prevent the kind of stale, insular mediocrity that follows the phrase “5-10 years of experience in our industry.”

So if you want better hires and more productivity with less management effort, shift your perspective. Invest in your hiring process. Trust in the fact that organizational commitment follows money–when you invest more money in recruiting, your managers will invest more energy getting the hiring exactly right.

The Five Essential Traits to Look for in an Interview

Every Sunday, Adam Bryant of the New York Times talks with top executives about the challenges of leading and managing. In his new book, “The Corner Office” (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that have emerged from his interviews.   He says that interviews he has conducted with more than 70 chief executives and other leaders  point to five essentials for success — qualities that most of those C.E.O.’s share and look for in people they hire.  This information comes from decades of collective experience of top executives who have learned first-hand what it takes to succeed.

Bryant lists the five qualities:

1. Passionate curiosity.
2. Battle-hardened confidence.
3. Team smarts.
4. A simple mind-set.
5. Fearlessness.

“The good news,” says Bryant, is “these traits are not genetic. These qualities are developed through attitude, habit and discipline — factors that are within your control. They will make you stand out. They will make you a better employee, manager and leader.”

This is some of the best advice on hiring I’ve read in quite a while.  Do yourself a favor and read the full article.

Affordable Job Perks

As the economy recovers and top performers start heading for the door, companies are looking for ways other than salary increases to compensate their employees.

In an article for the Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch, Ruth Mantell reports that companies project merit increases of 2.7 for 2011, compared with 2.3 for 2010 and 1.6 in 2009.  For employees at companies that are strapped for funds, Mantell writes, variations on the following rewards are a good way to hold on to top talent during  tough economic times: 

• Flexible schedules.  Flextime – allowing individuals to alter their working hours – or compressed work weeks are the most well known types of flexible schedules, but flexible schedules can be highly individualized to meet the work/life balance needs of productive employees.
• New job skills and responsibilities — Employers can teach workers new skills to reward them. Employees’ skill sets get increased with the hope that at some time, if the opportunity presents itself, they will be qualified for higher paying jobs.  Alternately, employers can reward younger workers with “stretch” assignments.  Mentoring programs also can help younger workers grow professionally.
• Career development and tuition reimbursement – Employers can pay for courses, conferences and membership to professional groups.  Employees can attend classes to help them develop new skills or work toward an advanced degree. Companies gain better-trained employees, while workers widen their skills.
• Small gestures – Small gestures can go a long way.  Reward top performers with a dinner.  Offer bigger employee discounts. Hand write a note to an employee to thank him/her for a job extra well done. “It isn’t cash,” says Bob Cartwright, founder of Intelligent Compensation, a consulting firm near Austin, Texas, “but these are the kinds of small things that help create a better environment. People are going to think twice about walking across the street to make another 25 cents an hour when they know they are working in a great environment.”

Top Performers Are on the Move

A recent study by Right Management confirms what we have been seeing across the job market – critical talent is on the move.   54% of organizations reported losing high-performing workers during the first 6 months of 2010.  We started reporting on this trend back in November of 2009, and our predictions proved accurate.

Top performers are grativating to positions that offer better career opportunities.  So while you need to pay careful attention to retaining your top people, there is another aspect to this story that is equally important.

Top candidates are becoming far more choosy in selecting their next position.   Here is the new reality of recruiting in this job market:

• More candidates will have multiple job offers – you cannot assume you are making the only job offer they will receive.
• More candidates will receive counter-offers from their current employer.  Although it is almost always a mistake to accept a counter-offer, the reality is that many employees do.
• Job offers will become more generous.  Simply offering a good job, with a financially stable company is no longer enough.  You have to make the most competitive offer you can, or you may not see your job offer accepted.   Good enough is no longer good enough to attract great people.

This is what recovery from a deep recession looks like.  Better get used to it.

The Zone of Incompetence

Around every top performer, you need to watch out for a “zone of incompetence” – an area where other people can relax just a bit, think a little less hard, or focus on other issues – trusting that the top performer will anticipate and correct any problems that come up.  The high achiever will always make sure the results turn out just fine. 

Of course, this is not always the case – some top performers encourage everyone around them to raise their standards, but I find this is less common in practice – it usually takes two or three top performers to ”raise the bar” for an entire work team.   Hey, it’s human nature – we all have too much to do.  If you work with a superstar, it’s just too easy to trust the top performer and go focus your attention on other problems.

When you manage a top performer, often you simply don’t realize just how much they did, or how many problems they overcame … until they are gone.  You can never be entirely sure if they were ”carrying” some other people on their coattails, or were just so talented that other people felt like they were “held back” and would cheerfully step up if given the opportunity.   When a top performer leaves, sometimes it creates room for other people to shine, but other times, the whole team collapses.

So when you are planning to promote a top person, or thinking about succession planning – pay keen attention to the “zone” around them.  Their supervisors, peers and subordinates just might be a bit too relaxed and trusting that things will “all work out.”    You would be wise to strengthen the zone all around a top person before you consider replacing them, because there is no tougher job than coming in to fill the shoes of a superstar … and no bigger hiring risk for you.

Your Best People Are Getting Calls

I just spoke with someone we placed last year.  The good news is that she is happy and thriving, likes the direction of her organization and sees a bright future for herself.  (Yeaa hiring process). 

But she also mentioned something you might consider bad news, or even find disturbing.  She said “I don’t know why, but I’m getting all these calls lately for people wanting me to interview for other jobs.” 

I don’t find this remotely disturbing.  And it does not surprise me one bit.  I already know your best people are getting calls from recruiters all the time. 

Your best people are routinely being enticed by your competition  – that’s just the reality of the workplace now.  And the trend is accelerating.  Top performers are always in demand, but sites like LinkedIn have now made it far easier for recruiters to find everyone.  Information just flows more freely now than it did 10 years ago.  

Ignore this shift at your peril.

Your top performers are weary, overworked and may be thinking it’s time for a change.   Some surveys say Gen X is most likely to leave first, many others say high performers are most vulnerable to leaving.  Either way, Fred Crandall, a senior consultant for Watson Wyatt says “There’s going to be a lot of churn” (turnover) as the economy improves.  I would have to agree, more turnover is coming.

So what are you doing to retain your key players?  How are you making them feel valuable?  What kind of performance feedback are you giving?  Studies show that most people want more feedback and many people feel ignored by their manager. 

If you accept this new reality that your best people are constantly being recruited, then you might want to check out what Les McKeown has to say.  He lists 7 Reasons Your Top Performers Are Likely to Leave in 2010, and 3 Things You Must Do Now to Retain Them.

Rock Stars, Glory Seekers, and Unicorns

Are you frustrated in facing a really complex problem?  Have all your attempts to solve it failed?  That is precisely when you must resist the temptation to hire a “rock star” or savior – someone who can magically solve all your problems simultaneously.   I often see companies who want someone to come in, understand a complex situation, create a strategy to solve it, then execute the strategy singlehandedly, then when it succeeds, hire a team to build on that success.  One magical person who takes all the risk, possesses all the knowledge, has a wide range of incredibly diverse skills, and gets results without rocking the boat, causing trouble or needing much help from anyone else in the firm.  They want a unicorn - a mythical creature that lives only in their mind’s eye.

Brandon Watson wrote a wonderful post “Under No Circumstances Should You Believe That You Need to Hire “Rock Stars.”  His point?  “You don’t need to hire the best employees, just the right ones.”  Brandon puts it this way:

“Hiring rock stars …  is inviting trouble because they are likely to be glory seekers who are thinking about their own personal rewards, and less likely to be thinking about the team.” 

(By the way, for more perspective on the hidden downside of hiring “rock stars” read BusinessWeek’s “Why Jerks are Bad Decision Makers“ profiling ex-luminaries like Bernie Madoff, Lehman Brother’s Dick Fuld,  AIG’s Joe Cassano, and Bear Stearns’ Jimmy Cayne).

So, if you want to lower your risk and increase your ability to solve complex problems, instead of trying to hire a unicorn/rock star, instead build a team of top performers - make sure every single job in your company is filled with a top performer.   Do that, and no rock star (with their toadying entourage of mediocre performers) will ever be able to compete with you.  So this begs the question of what, exactly,  is a top performer?  

“A top performer is someone who is capable of, and interested in, driving the business results you need – someone who will take responsibility for getting results within the norms of your company culture.”

So, now let’s come back to how, instead of hiring a rock star, you might go about solving your frustratingly complex problem, using your team of top performers.  Working together, one person might provide the context and institutional knowledge of the problem, another might develop the strategy, another might play the skeptic – challenging assumptions and flawed reasoning, another might focus on execution, and another might work on hiring the team and providing the project management oversight needed.   In short it probably takes the talents of several people … and that is a good thing.  Because the future is only going to move faster and be more complex than anything we have seen so far – and whatever problems you are facing now will look easy compared to the problems that are yet to come.  So you’re going to need that team, trained,  primed, experienced,  and ready to tackle your next challenge, and the one after that.

The Hidden Problem of Genial Generalists

Well rounded employees, we all like working with them.  They are the cheerful, upbeat, utility player – the kind of person you can put anywhere and they do well.  Often described as team players, self starters, and good all around generalists.  Small companies particularly love them.   Entrepreneurs like having people around who can “turn on a dime” and are not flustered when the company turns in a new direction. Utility players do not have job descriptions, but are more commonly doing a  hodge podge of unrelated tasks – making these people very hard to hold accountable – which is, of course, the hidden problem with hiring genial generalists.  Utility players are not very demanding to manage, but it’s hard to get spectacular results from them.

If you want to keep your small company small, hire lots of good generalists.  Give them a diverse blend of responsibilities.  Have them fill in the gaps when you launch new initiatives.  Have them cover for vacant positions, or help out underperforming workers.   Rely on their good nature to “roll with the punches” if you have not fully thought through a change initiative.   You’ll enjoy their cheerful demeanor when you move the goal posts. 

Just don’t plan to grow.

If you want to grow, to meet your business goals, then hire some people you can hold accountable.  Instead of hiring only genial generalists, hire some hard-driving, achievement oriented people - people who are really good at setting and achieving goals.   (Yes, there are plenty of results-oriented people who can still play well with others). 

When you hire top performers, you may not have as much fun when you change direction, you will get more “push back” when you muddle their responsibilities, and you will definitely have some explaining to do when you move the goal posts.   

But you will be much more likely to reach your goals.

We’re Going to Double Next Year … No, You’re Not

I love, love love working with entrepreneurs.  I love their indomitable spirit, the reckless relentless optimism.   I choose to spend my time with visionaries, not skeptics – firmly believing that the person who says “It can’t be done” is often interrupted by someone doing it.   And I think you should never doubt your ability to change the world.

That said, when an executive who has not grown their business in any of the past few years tells me they expect to double their business next year, I am skeptical.   One magical hire will not make this happen for anybody.  Venture capitalist Tony Tijan calls this simplistic thinking the “Fallacy of Financial Metrics” in a recent post on the Harvard Business blog.  Tony makes several excellent points including:

“In both entrepreneurial and larger companies, we too often spend time focusing on the desired financial performance target, rather than the inputs that drive those numbers. Because boards, investors and management demand an objective way to measure performance, we often go right to the result without focusing on what caused those results.

Financial performance is a result, a by-product, a consequence of something else. The financial “numbers” ultimately represent the scorecard we care about, but they do not help us understand how to score.”

Executives often tell me they want someone with “fire in the belly” or a “burning desire to win” – they want someone who can “run through walls”, someone who does “not need a handbook” to figure it out.  And once hired, the CEO often tells me they plan to ”set them loose” on these thorny, still unresolved problems.  Except here is the problem.  While the problem is probably old, the new hire is going to be, well, new to the organization.  So the new hire needs to learn how the problem came to exist, and understand all the contributing factors.  And the new hire will not, despite assurances to the contrary, have carte blanche to change the company.  Therefore, the new hire is coming into a company that will constrain their actions in all kinds of subtle and not so subtle ways.   Einstein put it this way “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” More directly to the point – as my friend Jamie Notter puts it – “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”

Top performers know all this.  They are called top performers because they know how to find work environments that give them a chance to shine.  And they often find ways to shine in work environments where others fail – but they never stack the deck against themselves.  So if you want to recruit them, talk to them about your actual challenges, don’t feed them happy talk about financial metrics that may occur once their hard work is done.  (Read:  The Truth is Great Marketing).  If you want to assess their fit to your job, look for the competencies they have to solve your actual problems, their proven track record of relentlessly driving the actions that will get results, and stop looking for “fire in the belly” and other attributes that are nearly impossible to quantify.

And after you do these things?  Yeah…  THEN I believe you will double next year.

Managing is More Fun When You Hire “A” Students

After twenty years of managing people, there came a time when I thought I did not want to manage people any more.  I used to joke with my friends that “if you have employees, you have staffing problems.”  So when I started Staffing Advisors and had no employees for a few years, I thought it was great.   I told my clients I wanted to SOLVE staffing problems, not HAVE staffing problems.  

But, of course, it’s tough to grow that way.  It’s hard to get new ideas, to get the perspective you need.  And innovation slows to a crawl.  Well, of course Staffing Advisors grew and added employees over the years.  But I have been very careful to surround myself with “A” students - not people who need constant supervision – and definitely not people who need me to “motivate” them.  (I think motivation is intrinsic, it’s a waste of time to try to “put back in” what nature left out).

I really only have patience for working  with people who set such high standards for themselves that all I need to do is outline my expectations, allocate resources, train new skills occasionally, coach a bit, and at the end of a project, say a simple “thank you” for a job well done.   

 ”A” students require no motivation, it’s built-in.  They are the kind of people that over-prepare, that always judge themselves more harshly than I do, and who always find something they think they could have done better.  The kind of people who score a 96 on the test, are irritated by what they missed, and then go for the extra credit assignment.    They are fast learners, because they are never satisfied with good enough, and always want to learn more.   They keep pushing, and in doing so, they become absolute experts in whatever they are learning about.  Bear in mind, I’m not just talking about academic learning – I’m talking about learning in any field of human endeavor – as Bruce Lee once said, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

Jenny Blake wrote an interesting post about what it is like to be a high achiever.   It’s a great guide to recognizing this talent in other people, and offers a few lessons in how to manage them.   It also points out the perils of being a top performer.  That relentless internal drive that causes people to keep upping the ante and reaching for higher goals, can also put people at significant risk for burnout. 

If you choose to hire and manage “A” students, your management challenge does not go away, it simply changes.  Rather than trying to “motivate” people - supervising and checking up on them,  instead you spend time encouraging them to find balance – encouraging them to take vacations, making sure they don’t obsess over every task, and helping them celebrate victories -  instead of simply rushing off to ”climb the next mountain.”   

Personally, I find managing “A” students is a LOT more fun and rewarding than managing people who actually need supervision.

Why is the DC Job Market so Irritating?

Employers - here’s more bad news:  The DC job market is showing signs of returning to “normal.”  While hiring for some jobs is easier now, “normal” for DC means that employers will have an increasingly difficult time finding highly qualified people to fill every critical opening.   

The daily drumbeat of bad economic news that has pummeled us all since November is slowly letting up.   Government recovery plans are taking shape, and government money will soon be flowing (yea!)   Layoff notices are not coming quite so quickly.   And a once in a generation hiring opportunity is slowly beginning to slip away from you.  You are now missing one of the best chances to upgrade your workforce that you may ever experience.

I know hiring managers find this hiring difficulty both astonishing and really, really irritating.  They want to upgrade to better people, they really do, but most just don’t know how.   HR professionals (who are often short-staffed themselves) are hearing managers bitterly complain about their internal recruiting efforts:   

“Are you kidding me?  In the midst of the worst recession in twenty five years, we can’t find better candidates than this?”

“I can’t believe I have to pay a search fee in a recession?  Seriously.  Where are the good people?”

“Are you telling me that we received 300 resumes from our ad on Monster and only three are worth interviewing?”

So why didn’t this huge financial calamity, this Near Great Depression, this global fiasco make hiring easier for ALL of us here in DC? 

Well the recession did make hiring easier, if you were looking for people to work in Detroit.  Or if you were looking for construction workers, auto workers, or Wall Street types.  But you aren’t looking for those people, now are you?  No, you are looking for the same skills everyone else is, and those skills are still in relatively short supply, because very few firms in our area had big  layoffs of people with really hard-to-find skills.  (Circular logic, I know, but it’s still true.)

So what evil forces are conspiring against your recruiting efforts?   Why are you still missing out on this once-in-a-generation hiring opportunity? 

First, don’t confuse national unemployment rates with local unemployment rates.  We are deeply fortunate to work in the strongest job market in the country - our unemployment rates for most occupations never really spiked.  But to take it a step further, don’t confuse the macro unemployment rate with the number of highly qualified job seekers who have the skills you need to thrive in a recession.   It’s a darn shame that thousands of unemployed auto workers don’t make it easier for you to hire your next CFO, but they don’t.

 Second, “post and pray” job advertising does not work any better now than it did before - you just get 300 desperate unqualified people instead of 100 or 150.  Sure you get a few gems in there, but not as many as you would expect, given that everyone tells us this is the worst economy they have ever seen. 

But the biggest reason you are not seeing great people lining up to take your jobs, is you haven’t thought enough about who you want to hire yet.   When you post a job without first taking the time to think hard about it, everybody who reads your ad can tell right away.  And the person you want?  That hard charging, no excuses, high achieving, go-getter who gets results in a recession?  They are results oriented, so when they know you are not seriously thinking about your business, they do not even apply.

In the past few weeks I have had a dozen clients tell me the same thing, almost verbatim:  ”We’ve been trying to hire someone on our own for several months now, and with the economy so bad, I really expected we would have filled it, but all I’m doing is sifting through resumes and nobody jumps out at me – I just don’t have time for this and I can’t afford to leave this critical position unfilled any longer. 

Hey DC, welcome back to your “normal” irritatingly familiar ways.

How Important is Effective Recruiting, Really?

We’re working with a client to solve a problem with their talent pipeline.  They have a steady (if slightly unpredictable) need to find one or two very expensive, very “hard to find” people every month. 

I live to solve problems like this.   Ask me about FMLA or the tax implications of a Flexible Benefit plan and I’m utterly adrift.   But talk to me about a systemic recruiting problem and I’m all over it.   (If you are like me, your mind is already working on the problem and you are thinking of where to find pockets of candidates, thinking of what outreach strategies to use and figuring out how you might use various social media strategies to engage them in a conversation?  Ok, well, maybe that’s not you and just the voices in my head talking…)

Anyway, it’s a great gig.   The CEO totally “gets it.”   He knows that the candidate experience needs to be consistent from awareness building, through initial contact, through cultivation, through the entire recruiting process, through the offer/acceptance/onboarding process, through the performance management /compensation process, through the employee referral process.  One cohesive, authentic experience that conveys “You are important to us a person, you are important to our success, and your personal success is important to us.” 

When we get the recruiting strategy right, he wins.  Get it wrong he loses.  Because the right people are at the very center of his growth plans. 

The CEO knows his current uncertain, unpredictable talent pipeline means several (very bad) things to this firm long term:

• His first line managers are tempted to settle for mediocre people because the flow of good ones is so uncertain.  So senior managers have to watch hiring much more closely to avoid the mistakes that come from settling for Mr. Right Now, instead of Mr. Right.
• More time is wasted in the interview sequence because managers are currently choosing from the “best of the worst” instead of the best of the best.  
• Work piles up, deadlines get missed, teams get stressed and customer service suffers as positions go unfilled longer.
• Managers are very reluctant to manage performance tightly because everyone is so hard to replace.
• The sales team is not emboldened because “yes but how will we staff it?” lurks in the back of everyone’s mind.
• Teams are burdened with low performers, because, well, someone is better than no one right?  And loyal top performers pick up the slack without complaining…up to a point, and then they start to look around…and the death spiral of lowered expectations starts in earnest.
• Employee referrals are a tiny fraction of what they could be, because, nobody asked, and well, you don’t want your friends to be put off by a lousy, uncertain hiring process, and burdened with slacker teams now do you?
• Oh, and millions of dollars ride on the outcome. 

So yeah, my client and I both think effective recruiting is really important, and its’ importance is not diminished one iota during a recession.  Because great people never line up around the block to work for anyone.  Someone needs to know exactly who they are looking for and draw them into a conversation first.

An excellent framework for thinking about the recruiting pipeline  is Doug Davidoff’s recent post about The New Marketing Funnel.  While not written with recruiting in mind, I think it’s a great contribution to the ROI of Social Media debate. 

We HR blogniscenti love to debate active vs. passive job seekers, social media vs job boards, xraying Linkedin  using boolean searches, cold calling techniques, etc..  It’s a great education and a spirited debate, but for me, it’s only entertainment until I can apply that knowledge to solve a real world problem for a CEO who “gets it”  and have a transformational impact on the success of his firm.

Topgrading for Small Companies? Still No

 Brad Smart, the author of Topgrading, wrote a very thoughtful reply to my recent post called “What Exactly is a Top Performer?”   I was pretty hard on Topgrading in my post and Brad intelligently rebutted my arguments in several areas, suggesting I read his free 50 page e-book “Avoiding Costly Mis-Hires.”  

I did read the e-book, and I will get to that, but first I have to say… this is great!  We’re having a conversation about my favorite topic, in a public forum, with a renowned expert on hiring.   And when I say “we” – that includes you – so post a comment, send me an email if you are shy, share your experiences!  

• First a bit of context.  I consult with, and write this blog for, small to midsize employers. 
• Brad Smart consults with employers of all sizes.  He is best known for his work with GE and the global 100, but he has plenty of raving fans among smaller employers.  One big fan is the very well-respected Verne Harnish -  founder of Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) – who calls Topgrading the “Best Approach to Interviewing.”   Verne also says Topgrading is “not for amateurs” and warns that it takes time and focus to make sure you are getting it right.

And there is the rub.

I read Brad’s free 50 page e-book (pdf).  It does indeed make a strong case for Topgrading, with lots of links to other resources.  (One link that grabbed my attention was ”Most Personality Tests are Shams“).  Naturally you cannot learn Topgrading in 50 pages, because, as Verne notes, it’s not easy to learn.  

The e-book’s primary objective is apparently to rebut the (common?) argument that Topgrading is hard to learn, by proving that it’s worth it.   He makes the case well, and I really enjoyed reading it, and loved seeing my favorite quotes from Jim Collins and Peter Drucker about the competitive advantage of hiring great people – Brad and I definitely agree that hiring high performers makes a huge impact on your ability to get results.   

But in reading it, I found nothing that would help my clients make better hires, short of implementing a massive, formal, top heavy initiative to learn how to conduct a Topgrading interview.  And that is simply not practical when you are hiring only one or two of each kind of person, and not 50 or 100 like they do at GE.  Smaller organizations need to think hard, move fast, and make the best decisions possible with imperfect information – jobs are not static, they change rapidly.  You can’t look back at the last 50 people hired in a job or look forward to tracking their results a year from now, because you hired ONE.  As someone who runs a search firm, I am also cognizant of the candidate perspective, which is generally not favorable toward Topgrading.  

So I’m sorry Brad, I sincerely appreciate your comments, but I still think Topgrading is too top heavy for 99% of small and midsize companies – and I just don’t think it’s necessary – there are better ways to achieve the same results.  Maybe Verne will prove me wrong, but I just can’t recommend it.  We’ll continue putting all our energy into developing faster, less expensive, less cumbersome ways to help our clients consistently hire people who will drive business results.

Now, that said, here is where I absolutely, positively agree with Mr. Smart:

What Exactly is a Top Performer?

I cringe every time a hiring executive tells me they use Topgrading.  My reaction is visceral when people mention “Hiring A Players.”  (So naturally I cheered when Harvard Business Review published the far more sensible “Let’s Hear it for B Players.”)

I acknowledge that Brad Smart is a very credentialed guy and he has built quite a dynasty on the Topgrading concept -  I just never see it applied intelligently in small and midsize enterprises.   Never.  (Remember,  I work hard to avoid using absolutes in sentences, so I must be adamant about this).   

OK, so I also freely admit that I gave up and only made it halfway through the book (worst beach read ever).  I just find Topgrading too rigid and impractical.  And no way will most managers first learn the interview techniques and then spend 3 hours in a CIDS interrogation, I mean interview. . . no, I mean interrogation.

What I object to most about Top Grading is the vague definition of an “A Player” -  “the top 10% of available talent for the compensation level” -  like anyone could possibly determine who exactly qualifies.  But this is what really irks me; even if you did figure it out, it would NOT help you hire correctly.

One thing I know for certain:  top performance in one environment does not necessarily predict top performance in another.  Simply hiring Olympic athletes or poaching your competitor’s top person guarantees you nothing.  Nothing.

So rather than filling your company with mythical “A Players”  here is strategy that will dramatically improve both your results and the quality of your life: