Why your Business Needs Superstars

The direct and indirect impact of superstars

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to suggest that superstar employees have a positive effect on the business they work for, but it’s important to understand that this effect is both directand indirect. It’s directin the sense that the high-flying employee will always go above and beyond to consistently produce an excellent standard of work, and indirectin terms of how the employee improves the productivity of the other members of the team!

To support my point, let’s take a look at research by the National Bureau of Economic Research in the US. Their study focussed on superstars within a higher education environment where they found that departmental output increased by 54% but only 6% of this was down to the direct actions of the superstar employee in that department.

The authors suggested two ways that the superstar could have indirectly increased departmental output:

1. They fostered an environment which resulted in increased productivity of other team members.
2. They had input in terms of recruitment and therefore more high calibre employees were subsequently hired.

Although it’s important not to generalise these findings to other industries or sectors, the research definitely highlights the potential wide-ranging positive impact superstar employees can have on the business they work in, which leads me nicely to my next point…

Retaining superstars

To retain high flyers, it’s important that these individuals are suitably challenged and stretched so they won’t get bored! Boredom is a killer and can often lead to the high flyers of an organisation leaving for more exciting or fulfilling roles. So why not offer them your most difficult projects, or get them to take the lead and plan a project from scratch?

If you want your superstar to stick around, you can’t employ a one-size fits all approach when it comes to incentivising performance. The targets you set for the rest of the team might be too easy for your high flyer to achieve and therefore you might find it difficult to continually reward your superstar, resulting in them becoming disenfranchised and feeling undervalued. It is therefore better to take some time to understand what motivates your superstar employee to produce exceptional results and then suitably craft incentives based on what you find!

If you’d like some help or advice with incentivising your superstars, just get in touch with the team!