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How To Manage Star Performers

This article is more than 7 years old.

If you work in HR, or even leadership more generally, then you will no doubt be familiar with the so called war for talent, as organizations scrabble to get the best and brightest through their doors.  It's an argument that suggests that talent is an additive thing, and the more you have of it, the better your organization will be.

Given the importance attributed to talent management in recent years, it's perhaps no surprise to see a growing number of academic studies into the impact of star performers on the workforce.

For instance, a study last year found that placing a star performer front and center of a team can inspire others around them, as they act as a significant marker by which the rest of the team look to for normative behaviors.

“The extra miler has more of an influence in the center because they have more contact with other workers and because others can see what they’re doing,” the authors say. “Through this role modeling, everyone on the team becomes better. If the extra miler is on the periphery, they don’t come into contact with as many team members and nobody notices them.”

A similar finding emerged from a second study, published recently, which set out to investigate the impact of working alongside a star has on our own performances.

Working With A Star

The authors examined workers in three restaurants to assess both individual and collective performances.  The sector was chosen both for its low productivity levels and high variability among staff, but also its high turnover rates, thus providing a nice petri dish to analyze the effect of team compositions on performance.

The researchers established a baseline skill level for each employee to then assess how that level fluctuated depending on their co-workers on a given shift.  When the results were analyzed, a kind of bell curve emerged whereby just the right sprinkling of stars would lift the performances of laggards, but too many would see those same employees underperform.

A study from a few years ago might shed some light on just why this occurs.  It found that when we compare ourselves with our peers, we tend to compare upwards rather than downwards.  This is because of the well known illusory superiority bias that sees us have a poor self-perception of ourselves, and thus over-inflate our abilities.

So whilst seeing a certain number of high performers can provide positive role models for us to look up to, place too many in a team and it prompts negative self-comparisons and a reduction in effort.

The Size Of The Impact

Most managers are striving to get a bit more out of their teams, so theoretically, this could be a very cost-effective way of doing that, but just how big a boost can you achieve?

Well, the authors of the restaurant study suggest that in a typical restaurant (with a typical variance in good and not so good staff), the correct balance of a team can boost performance by around 2-3%.  Whilst this sounds relatively modest, when put in the context of typical profit margins in the industry of 3-9%, it's significant.

This kind of boost was particularly pronounced when teams were on the smaller side, and the spillover was only really seen when workers were physically close to one another, so it's not clear that it has the same impact in virtual environments.

Managing Your Stars

Of course, this isn't to say that any of this is easy, and indeed previous studies have shown that star performers can often bare the brunt of bullying from managers, whilst there are also instances where they are loaded down with additional menial work that often wastes their talents.

A more beneficial approach might be to alter the compensation scheme so that it focuses more on the impact the star performer has on their peers.  As visibility is so important, you might also consider putting your best performers in a location where they are noticeable to their peers.

Or you might follow the guidance of a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, who advocated in a recent study that high performers appreciate autonomy in how they go about their work.

Whatever approach you take, hopefully this post will go some way to help you manage the star performers in your team.

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