Often the best, most capable employees are often the hardest to manage. For the truly great, it's not arrogance or ego, but often the unusual nature of their thinking that causes problems for less experienced managers. Crack the code and you and your team will really excel.

Read on: blog.WednesdayWin.com​

Read time: 4 minutes

Learning how to align your most creative and productive thinkers with your goals will unlock entirely new levels of success for your organization. But fail to keep up and your great staff will be heading for the door and fast. Let's dive in:

1. You wanted outliers in performance...well, they're likely outliers in other ways, too

You are in search of those 10x employees who can create and produce at a rate so far ahead of everyone else that it's hard to believe the positive impact they are having on your organization.

But the exact unique way of thinking that make them so much more productive than others is the very same reason they tend to think so differently in terms of compensation total and structure, management, working situations, and fundamental mental models and methods.

You should be prepared for what seem like unusual requests, desired company policy exceptions, and possible challenges to your usual ways of doing things. That doesn't mean you should just give in as a manager, but be prepared to learn the reasons behind these requests and behaviors and seek out workable solutions that allow you to maintain overall good morale while creating the kind of conditions that can drive high productivity across the team.

You need to learn new tools. What out for implicitly imposing your ways of thinking on others. Be observant. Listen more. Seek to understand patterns of behavior and facilitate higher performance by removing needless impediments

• You wanted outliers, you found them
• Be open to listening more and understanding better what's being requested, the behavior exhibited, and how that can be mapped to your goals
• This is where command and control fully gives way to servant leadership
• Dig in to develop your fundamental management chops; there's more to leading a team than just being in a manager box on the org chart

2. Seek to understand, not dominate

Hard charging managers struggle mightily with the idea that what drives them does not likely motivate most of their team members and especially their top performers. Your ambition is likely not the ambition of those around you.

You need to engage with people and seek deeper understanding of their goals. What is the career arc they area looking to follow? What do they value most in their work on your team (hint: while comp is important, trust and freedom of the right sorts is usually more so). Where do they want to learn? Where do they want to lead.

But don't ever forget: your goals and aspirations are different than those of your team members. So seek out deeper understanding of your team's top performers.

• Pursue understanding of your team through observation, direct engagement, and in structured feedback like annual reviews
• True listening is such a rare skill. Take care and learn now to seek understanding and not bully your team into submission
• Recognize that just like the five love languages impact how people receive the sense of love in romantic relationships, so too do employees each have a unique mix of sources of feelings of value and appreciation
• Seek out the unique mix that best fits each member of your team

3. Mission driven or transactional?

This is a particularly difficult task for many middle managers in large organizations: you say you want mission-driven employees who are focused on delivering for and with their teams, but you actually treat them like transactional units you manipulate at will.

Bring your humanity to your job. Don't just lean on policies to treat employees poorly. You've taken the time to hire with care so treat everyone with respect and involve them in the process—especially when the decision to be made is particularly difficult or likely to be unwelcome by team member.

Don't burn your best employees by casual disrespect in an effort to avoid a difficult conversation. Think about the long-term value of a skilled and highly engaged member of your team. Don't just exploit them for short-term transactional results.

• Build up long-term trust and remain worthy of it
• Don't lean on company policy or other crutches to try to skip out on the difficult conversations necessary at times in leadership
• Over time, you will see your style increasingly reflected back on you, so embrace productive partnership over exploitation

4. Letting go isn't failure

One of the greatest challenges in leading exceptional performers is that you may run out of opportunities before they reach their goals. Accepting that the best move for them might be to leave the company and work elsewhere. You should try to prevent that from happening in advance when you can with compensation, project opportunities, training, growth, promotions, and other incentives, but that may not be enough.

If an employee decides to leave, let them. Treat them with grace and honest expression of appreciation for what they have brought to the team and the company. Counter-offers and last minute changes can sometimes succeed in keeping an employee, but almost certainly either you or the employee (or most likely everyone involved) will end up disappointed and the employee will likely still leave soon after.

Letting go for someone else's growth isn't failure, but it can feel that way. Show your respect for all of your current employees by treating departing team members with respect and appreciation for what they've brought. You'll find that the alumni network of your past employees is far more valuable than any satisfaction from brushing them off as they walk out the door.

• Great employees may need to leave for their career goals
• Show your respect for all of your team by how you treat those who are leaving
• Counter-offers are rarely successful endeavors even if they appear to work at first; it also sets bad precedent for the rest of your team
• Build a powerful alumni network from your past colleagues to power your long-term success

Action Summary

Leading 10x performers requires more creativity, personal investment, and overall management skill than with other employees. Be ready and willing to dive deep to better understand the unique characteristics that drive those exceptional employees.

It's worth the effort.

• Outliers in one dimension often are outliers in other dimensions, too
• Your ambitions and goals are not everyone's on your team; get to know their unique priorities
• If you want mission driven teams, treat them individually as part of the long-term mission and vision
• Some may grow out of the opportunities you have available and that's OK to support and recognize

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What do you think? What management challenges have you had to address as a manager? Reply to this email and let me know.

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To your success,

Christopher

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P.S. Like this one? You'll probably want to check out this earlier Wednesday Win essay on managing to the right goals for your team, too.

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