Know what you should do to retain your high performance employees

No organisation wants to lose a high potential employee but with mushrooming organisations, especially start-ups, it is becoming difficult to manage, engage and motivate the High Performance Pool, or the HIPOs.

Companies have special criteria for HIPO and Global Leadership Forecast 2014|2015 stated a research that in India 72% organisations have a HIPO programmes, but the alarming point was that 74% of these programmes are not very effective and that number is disturbingly high.

Research is evident that organisations that have HIPO programmes are 3.6 times more likely to outperform their peers financially (to be in the top 20% versus the bottom 20% in financial performance).

So, this proves that talent has an impact on financial performance, which will thereby lead to right business investments due to right talent investments

So, to retain HIPO, who are your future strategists, who have the capability to fill up your executive level positions in future, not only differential treatment but investment of time and efforts at both ends are required.

I can relate this to my real life scenario. When my son was in primary school and as a parent I had two choices, either to go traditional and look at his development areas and coach him or going that extra mile and taking efforts to enhance his strengths. This meant extra effort and time on his strength enhancement and at the same time working on his development areas.

We do the same with our organisations today. While we develop leadership development programmes for the larger group, we, simultaneously, go that extra mile for our HIPOs.

Another interesting fact from the aforesaid research revealed that 85% organisations agree that senior management is held accountable for identifying and developing high potential leaders.

With my experience in the talent development industry, I have witnessed that a senior management buy in really helps drive efforts in the right direction.

So how to retain the talent pool is the big question?


First things first. We have to separate potential from performance from readiness.

These three concepts – performance, potential, and readiness – are often confused as potential is the likelihood that an individual can develop into a successful leader with significantly expanded, higher-level leadership responsibilities.

While performance stands for an individual’s level of success in executing objectives in current (or past) roles, readiness is the degree to which an individual’s competencies, experiences, knowledge, and personal attributes meet the requirements for a role or job family.

Initiate quality high-potential programs: These programmes are not an event but a journey giving each of them a holistic development opportunity. Ensure that the journey is a good mix of different learning mediums including formal classroom training, web, virtual, mobile, social, automated simulations and skill application. Ensure that you give them a platform to apply the newly learnt skills in their job.

Objective assessment data on HIPOs capability/potential: You don’t hit the dart first to form a dartboard. . Similarly, training someone’s capabilities without knowing his gaps is not going to hit the right target. Assessing people at right level provides critical insights that are important to accelerate development for current and future leaders’ strengths and weaknesses. Not all assessment systems are created equally. Have an in-depth understanding before you sign up your HIPO to the right one required at that level.

Mentoring/coaching program for HIPO: Most of these HIPO would be leading teams in future. One of the greatest development areas for managers is to be great leaders. Create the right environment for them to ensure that coaching is one of priorities. Now that we spoke about the downstream, also ensure that the upstream is taken care of. By this I mean, having a mentor for supporting the HIPO who can coach these high performers with the volatile journey ahead.

Multiple lenses: Your high performance pool is not only to be seen from a lens of replacing senior managers but creating a pool of successful contributors for your business. Look at them as creating entrepreneurs amongst your organisation, people who believe that this is their own business and driving strategy from heart and not from the project blueprint.

Implementation & Measurement: Measuring HIPO programme’s effectiveness is where we struggle the most and implementation is also a challenging area. Organisations that have understood this pain area and envisioned how they would approach this aspect have bore fruits.. Remember the golden rule of implementation if plan A doesn’t work you have plan B in place

(The author of this article is Anu Zachariah, M.D, DDI India)

(Image: Thinkstock)