What all-star employees want in a job:
I spend a lot of time asking my high performing friends what frustrates them about their work environments.
What do you dislike about your boss? What drives you crazy and causes stress at work? What makes you feel unproductive?
These conversations have taught me a lot about what to do and even more about what not to do.
And I’ve used these insights to design a place where high performing employees want to work.
As a result, I have very little turnover. I’ve created compensation plans to keep people around for the long haul, and I do the right things in my organization to reduce stress and make it enjoyable.
While there are many details about hiring and recruiting that will be specific to you and your business, I’ve found several key strategies that will help any entrepreneur retain competent people and create a great work environment for them.
Structure is good:
Business books, podcasts, and articles will tell you that employees want freedom above all else.
They want to make their own schedules. They want to solve problems on their own and work in a way that works for them. They want autonomy, flexibility, and a dynamic environment.
This is total bullshit.
Employees, even the highest performers, want structure. 99% of people prefer to be told what to do and how to win.
Straightforward solutions, benchmarks, and a clear path forward make them feel confident in you and the business. They don’t like dealing with ambiguous situations or uncomfortable conversations. They are actively trying to avoid chaos.
If they wanted chaos, they would be entrepreneurs.
I’ve made this mistake before. Believing that everyone thinks like me and enjoys making decisions with incomplete information, figuring things out as they go, and putting out fires.
This is the natural mistake of the entrepreneur—thinking everyone sees the world like we do and thrives on the same type of uncertainty.
The truth is that people who already have jobs want to be set up to succeed. They want to know what to expect. They want to know that if they do a certain thing well, the results will follow.
They want to do a good job, be recognized for their work, and get paid every other week. They want to have happy customers and happy co-workers. This can’t exist in an environment of chaos. So establish structure, rules, and tell people what to do.
And then hold them accountable for doing it.
Make decisions and changes quickly:
My friend in Boston totally crushed it at work.
He was an extremely competent in-house attorney for an insurance company who regularly met unbelievable deadlines and did the work of three people.
He was also very improvement focused, always looking for ways to make the business, its processes, and the lives of its employees and customers just a little bit better.
Many weekends, we sat around talking business over beer, and he told me about all of his ideas.
New customer management software. A better way to organize policies. Revamping the structure of the company to better serve the customers and remove inefficiency.
Unfortunately, he also complained about the outcome of all his ideas.
He regularly brought solutions to his bosses, and at first, they talked a big game. They agreed that the issues he pointed out were important and that the company needed to innovate to stay on the cutting edge.
And then nothing would happen. No implementation. No big decisions would occur.
What did I learn from him?
When the best performers know what needs to be done to improve things but they are stuck doing things the old, stressful way, it eats away at their souls and spirits.
It creates a culture of resentment. They will be gone before you know it.
My neighbor quit that job a few months later and went to work for a real estate developer who was openminded and aggressive. He is happier than ever.
The lesson:
You don’t need to take action on every piece of advice or idea an employee brings, but if you do nothing at all when your team knows there is a better way, your days are numbered.
Make decisions quickly and make things happen when the opportunity is clear! Move fast. Listen to your people when they have ideas. Change can be good. If you aren’t improving, you are dying.
This is how you keep your high performers happy.
Surround your A players with A players:
A few years ago, I got an email from one of my social media followers who hated her job.
She was an account manager at an insurance firm, and the buck stopped with her.
If her clients weren’t happy, she had to make it right or she would lose the account and lose a chunk of her income.
But she was surrounded by C players who were terrible at their job.
That meant picking up the slack for them when they made mistakes. It meant cleaning up their messes and often even doing their work.
She couldn’t spend her time doing what she did best—the client management—and it made her life as a high performer miserable.
She had gone to her boss many times to complain about the incompetence around her. Telling them she needed to hire new people and that the company should get rid of the hangers-on.
But her boss never did anything. They let it slide. And her life continued to be miserable until she quit and went somewhere else.
The golden rule of retaining A players:
If you surround them with C players, they will be miserable. If you do not have the courage or willingness to fire the incompetent people, they will be miserable. If they are stuck picking up the slack for people who are not good at their job, they will be miserable.
In corporate America, people can hide. People can do zero work for years and years and get promoted because they show up on time every day. High performers hate working for these giant corporations because incompetence is tolerated.
Do not let your company turn into this.
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A few tweets from this week:
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I'm an investor in an insurance company called Titan Risk. They are helping me with cyber insurance, errors and omissions and, most importantly, directors and officers liability.
The insurance guru at Titan, Jon, has helped over 1,500 clients get policies throughout his career. He’s offering 5 free consulting calls to share where you might be exposed and help you learn more about your coverage.
Respond to this email if you’d like an introduction.
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Onward and upward,
Nick Huber
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