High Performance Requires High Maintenance: What We Might Be Doing Wrong in Measuring Talent

I read a comment somewhere last month that High Performers in organizations are also high maintenance. I was instinctively offended by that statement when I first read it because how dare that person generalize all High Performers to be high-maintenance divas? I am so not high maintenance.

Full confession: after having that comment live rent-free in my head for weeks, I realized they were right; I am a high maintenance High Performer. But here’s the nuance that wasn’t part of the original comment: the high maintenance High Performers need in organizations is not the typical kind of “workplace diva” behavior most of us associate with the words ‘high maintenance’ (e.g., unreasonable total rewards demand). The type of high maintenance I am referring to is that High Performers are going to require more attention from their managers for feedback, they require more intellectual stimulation as they get bored quickly, and they will constantly challenge the status quo because “good enough” isn’t a thing in their world.

For better or worse, this realization started a whole train of thought around why we’re seeing so many organizations putting money, time, and energy into developing High Performers and high-performance culture but aren’t necessarily seeing the growth or retention results they were hoping for.

Here’s my hypothesis: as an industry, HR has more than figured out how to build for and optimize high performance at an individual level. We have yet to figure out how to sustain and maintain high performance in the organization at a macro and environmental level. While we are busy building individuals toward achieving great things, some of us may have forgotten to build an organization that continuously supports and encourages those achievements. Motivating individual employees is much easier than building and sustaining organizational infrastructure, processes, and culture on high performance.

Putting my analytics hat on for a moment and returning to the idea of what gets measured gets done, I would argue that high-performance programs aren’t taking off as much as they should because we have been mismeasuring performance.

We measure individuals, not their ecosystems

Think about how performance management is done in most organizations today—it is focused on the person. We solely measure the person, not their team, professional community, context, or anything else that contributed to their performance for the year. The premise of modern-day corporations is that it takes more than one person doing what they are good at to scale and grow an organization. Therefore, people must act and work as a team. So, how does it make sense if the corporation was created to enable teams for scale, but when it comes to the results, we only measure the individuals?  I have always been a fan of ONA, and four years after my first pilot project with Philip Arkcoll, I can now finally articulate why (possibly getting an award for the most delayed “ah-ha” from a customer ever). ONA is the only thing in the modern workplace that allows you to measure an ecosystem surrounding your High Performers in an unbiased way. Organizations must measure their people and environment to achieve a high-performance culture.

We measure program completion, not actions

This is where I have a bone to pick with traditional LMS and the way we approach learning in organizations. At some point, learning became a “check the box” exercise whereby we somehow assume that by completing some magical number of hours in coursework, one would automatically become a High Performer through knowledge osmosis and some self-evident multiple-choice knowledge check questions. If it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a true master of something, what makes us think that a few 45-minute to 1-hour-long e-learning courses will generate similar results? Further, if we acknowledge that coursework in LMS will not achieve the full results of high performance we are looking for, then why are we reporting learning course completion as a stat as if it’s meant to signal something? LMS completion rates may be a more accessible metric to obtain and report. Still, to truly understand talent, an organization must look at their people's practice and repeated actions, not the number of hours they put into learning modules.

We measure productivity, not progress

I think SMART goals have ruined goal setting for everyone. Don’t get me wrong, I directionally agree with why it is essential for goals to be SMART. The problem I have is with the execution of SMART goals in organizations. Too often, in the pursuit of specificity and ability to measure, people focus on productivity-oriented outcomes (e.g., achieve x% growth, y% reduction, etc.) and ignore the progress and development along the way. I have yet to see “Fail Better Next Time” as a SMART goal in performance management. Yet the spirit of failing smarter, growing, and learning along the way propels high performance.

The bottom line is that if an organization wants to go left (be high-performing) but looks the other way with how it measures talent, it becomes pretty easy to trip over rocks along the way.

Doing high-performance without planning and resourcing for the associated high maintenance of talent that is needed on an ongoing basis is like looking at ONE lone polar bear, wondering if it got lost and is therefore heading south, without ever seeing the bigger picture of its changing habitat.