How to hire and retain high performers

For over 20 years I have been recruiting senior executives for companies, from small privately owned businesses right up to global ASX100 organizations, and I have led teams of up to 750 personally.

I’m regularly asked by business owners and CEOs how to establish a culture of high performance, but more importantly, how to retain those top performers. If you can hire and keep the best possible team, this provides an incredible advantage over your competitors.

Here are five steps that business leaders can easily implement into their hiring and performance management process to achieve their organization’s goals.

1. Begin with the end in mind

Before you even go to the market, be extremely clear about what the role entails – what does success look like in the role? What are those mission critical outcomes that you want the employee to deliver?

Then you want to hire someone who has done it before, has done it well and is motivated to do it again. By ensuring that you, the recruiter and ultimately the candidates know exactly what is required and when, you can ensure that only high-performance individuals are considered.

2. Develop a relationship of accountability

Once the person is hired, immediately develop a relationship of accountability. High performers want to be accountable. They want to achieve great results. They also want to be loved and rewarded for the work they do.

Good leadership requires a fine balance of love and accountability. Too much love makes a person/team become soft and they are likely to underperform. Too much accountability and a person/team becomes brittle and either they only focus on achieving their personal KPIs, or they leave.

By immediately setting up a relationship where your new employee is held tightly accountable to those key deliverables identified and communicated through the recruitment process, and then praising great performance, you will achieve excellent results.

3. Have individuals and teams set their own KPIs

Follow the same process for your incumbent team, by supporting the setting of specific KPIs for both individuals and the team as a whole. By allowing the individual and/or team to set their own KPIs (assuming you agree and are happy with their targets), then they are more likely to take ownership and accountability for getting these things done.

4. Hire well and fire fast

If, within a few weeks, the agreed deliverables are not being met, then the person needs to be terminated. Most leaders (including myself) tend to retain poor performers for too long, hoping that they will ‘come right’.

The cost to your business through lost revenue, disgruntled customers and a negative team culture is simply not worth it. Make the tough call early and move them on.

5. Ask for feedback

Regularly ask your team members for three reasons why they love working for you. After all, they could easily be working for your competitor (or themselves) instead. You may be surprised by the variety of different responses each person gives, and what motivates them to stay.

Assuming that what they love is deliverable by you, make sure that they continue to get these things. Of course, it’s a two-way street and they need to continue to deliver to you what you love (for example, a high-performing team member who is a good culture fit). If they don’t love working for you, then either find out what will improve the situation, or move them on.

Through the introduction of these simple tactics, right from the top down, you will immediately see a tremendous improvement in performance and retention. The Chair should be following this process, both with the other board members and also the CEO.

The CEO should implement this process with their direct reports, and so on down the line. This is not something to be delegated to HR; it should be done by each hiring manager with each of their direct reports, plus teams as a whole.

Your organization deserves to both attract and retain the best performers in your industry and these steps will greatly enhance your ability to do so.