I have never met a business leader who didn’t want more high performers in their firm. How many of your direct reports are really high performers? Would it make a meaningful difference in your ability to reach your business goals if you had more high performers? What are you doing to turn your average performers into high performers? How do you motivate your high performers to keep them motivated and engaged so as to maintain high performance? When you are in the market to hire a key executive what do you do to insure that you hire a high performer?
If high performance is important to you, there certainly is a lot to think about.
I want to suggest, however, that a high performer is not what you really need. High performers are great, but there is even a more elite, a more coveted type of key executive to have on your team. And, the more you have, the merrier.
What you really need is the cream of the high performers, with the definition of performance being real financial improvement for your business unit. I call this breed of high performers…contributors.
Contributors are the people who really drive economic improvement in a business unit. They can be in financial, operational, sales…really, any type of position. They have ideas on how to grow the top line (without conceding margin), how to operate significantly more efficiently, how to reduce cost big time, and so on; and they can do it and/or lead a team to do it. They have what it takes to make it happen.
They can define, even foresee, a problem. They can fully and properly delineate it. And they can solve it. They can find an opportunity, contextualize it accurately and go get it.
Improving the economics of their situation is what motivates them.
A contributor walks into a job and when they leave, the profit contribution of the business unit is meaningfully better because of their ideas, their focus on profit contribution, their strategic and tactical reasoning abilities, and their leadership.
How many contributors do you have on your management team?
I don’t think that all high performers are necessarily contributors. High performers do well on the key attributes of their job. They perform well. You do need more high performers. Contributors do that, plus they drive the profit contribution up! You really need more contributors. Does this resonate with you? Let me know what you think?
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Great postLyn! I agree with you contributors are the most valuable part of any organization.
ReplyDeleteSeth Godin, the internationally acclaimed speaker, writer, and serial entreprenuer would agree as well. He calls them Linchpins and his latest boook is all about them and how to become one!
I enjoyed reading your post. I haven’t put a lot of thought into the differentiation between high performers and contributors. I’ve experienced both in my career and I’ll take as many contributors as possible any day of the week!
ReplyDeleteI am currently in the hunt for a new engagement and I’m hopeful that some companies will wake up in this economy and target contributors to add / replace in their staff.
As I’m out networking, I’m consistently amazed with how much talent is out there. Clearly, progressive organizations should be thinking about how to grab some of these talented contributors now.