A New Performance Management Paradigm

It’s been said by business gurus that your best recruiting strategy is to keep your top performers happy so you don’t lose them.

But, how can you keep your employees? The foundational answer is to stop thinking of them as yours.

Employees are people with free will. You don’t have any rights to them.

But adjusting your understanding of the employee/employer relationship, while a great start, is not sufficient to keep great people on your team. What else do you need to do?

The answer is to make sure your managers care about them, and if you’re at the top of the org chart, you need to care about the managers on your team. If you’re the leader, remember that you set the tone for your company’s culture.

If you or anyone in leadership views team members as a means to an end or as a vehicle to achieve production goals (or even worse, a way for you to make more money), everyone will know how you feel about them.

But how might you actively demonstrate that you care about your team members? I suggest you help them define and achieve their goals and dreams. Those dreams can be professional or personal, by the way.

Make it a part of your annual performance review process and take an interest in what motivates your people. Don’t make your process performative; rather, focus on making it as meaningful as possible. You can of course create guardrails in this process, but always remember that you should try to inspire your team members to become the best version of themselves possible. If team members don’t have dreams, I strongly urge you to help them devise some.

Yes, you should ensure that your employees are working to make the company better and address those goals when managing performance. But a company filled with people pursuing their dreams will be animated unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Further, you’ll have a building full of associates ready to move heaven and earth to make your company as good as it can be to repay you for investing in their lives.

And lastly, do you think you’ll have a turnover problem when you’ve helped people achieve meaningful life goals? My strong inclination is you’ll have people beating down your door to work there.