December 1997 Marketer Articles

Getting, Keeping, and Feeding Star Performers

By Karen Roper and Alan Lambert

Our Greatest Marketing Challenge
The greatest marketing challenge we face for the rest of this decade and well through the next is not to create sexier websites or establish larger client databases or even improve graphics. Our companies need star performers. We need individuals with the talent and drive to attract good clients and curry their favor and loyalty. And we need the technical depth to keep clients happy.

These roles can no longer be reserved for principals alone. Clients respond favorably to excellent service as a practical matter. But they cherish most the personal relationships they form with people they enjoy working with.

The people who work directly with clients are what truly distinguishes one firm from another, for better or worse. People reflect the cultural quality of a company – its core personality. And star performers represent the highest form of that personality.

As leaders in the A/E/C industry, our marketing challenge is to:

• Build the organizational infrastructure that attracts star performers and the clients who follow them.
• Identify, recruit, interview, promote, and sustain those technical leaders who already are or can become stars.
• Create a cultural ethos within our organizations that nurtures star performance and allows that quality to seep into other areas of the organization.

The Bidding Game
What attracts star performers to a company? And how does the company maintain an individual’s loyalty in the face of cannibalistic recruitment practices by competing firms?

Principals in leading firms have tested the gamut of reward options: more money, better positions, more power, other perks, even a piece of the ownership pie. To their chagrin, they’ve discovered: Once you enter the bidding game, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to continually raise the ante to keep your key employees happy.

More importantly, if bidding wars continue, some firms will eventually be driven out of business as the cost of maintaining stars exceeds their ability to remain profitable.

Equally important, principals have discovered the dilemma that rewarding star performers sometimes equates to cultivating prima donnas and engaging in blatant favoritism. They’ve found that regular bonuses create a sense of entitlement. And, technical talent nearly always feels slighted when corporate perks and public recognition go largely to the company stars.

The authors have studied this issue from the perspective of both loyal and dissatisfied stars in the context of both thriving, successful firms and floundering ones.

We believe star performers are most loyal to organizations whose cultures encourage their excellence. Such firms create high-performance organizations that integrate what stars require to succeed and what the firms themselves need to thrive without sacrificing quality, profitability, or the performance of talented employees who lack star quality.

Team Leaders vs. Technical Associates
Successful firms employ star performers on both sides of the project-client interface: (1) team leaders -- client-builders who can effectively develop and marshal team resources to service clients; and (2) technical experts -- effective producers who can articulate and maintain a high level of project delivery performance and quality control.

The leaders need to build support from the technical experts to succeed. The technical experts are vital to the firm’s survival, but lack the leadership qualities necessary to become a firm principal. The firm’s culture must recognize these dual roles so that each is appropriately compensated.

In this article, we concentrate on the team leaders, but address the needs of technical experts where appropriate.

Rewarding Achievers
Star performers are Achievers who want:

• Credit for their accomplishments
• Control of their lives
• An ownership stake in the business
• Support from their teams
• Status as the best in their fields, particularly in terms of the success they generate through the teams they build
• To work with winners (teams and companies)
• Compensation that reflects their continuing contribution to their firms’ bottom lines and confirms their star status

From our investigations, we conclude that credit, control, ownership, support, status, and organizational culture are equally or more important than salary to most star performers. We also believe that most firms are missing opportunities to create cultures that more elegantly and durably achieve meaningful commitment – and, in turn, re-create themselves as successful, high-performance organizations.

Credit
"Give credit where credit is due" is one of the oldest maxims in the English language, yet, time and again we overlook it. Giving credit does not mean walking into Bob’s office to say "great job" when his team performs well.

It means making sure everyone knows he and his team have done a great job: their clients, their peers, their families, their communities.

Some organizations establish honor or award systems. They present honors publicly at work, and send notice to the local papers in their town, the client’s town (citing the work they’re doing for the client, of course), and any individual on the team’s home town.

They send notifications of any honors or awards to their employees’ families. They never miss a chance to celebrate their employees’ successes and accomplishments. And, they earn the loyalty of employees who feel celebrated and appreciated.

Control

• Star performers need to know that they control their own destinies.
• They need control of their project successes and of their own personal successes.

Control of their projects involves more than preparing and implementing their own scope of work. For leaders, it involves the necessary means to recruit and build effective teams. For technical stars, it means selecting and mentoring their key supporters so that projects are designed or constructed under their direction.

Matrix management, once a popular structure for putting "the best person on the right job at the right time" allows companies to balance the workload among employees from across the firm. But, it fails miserably for team building and satisfying clients. Clients want teams whose members have worked together long enough to have streamlined their processes and their communications. Cohesive teams are simply more efficient and more effective.

Creating stable teams means neither type of star will have to compete with others for the best CAD-designer. They won’t have to wonder if their project has priority. They won’t have to wonder if an architect, engineer, or field manager understands the way they want things done. They won’t have to suffer personality conflicts they can’t resolve and disgruntled employees who are unhappy with their treatment by others outside the team.

They can create a team that is totally attuned to a common goal through which team players share in the successes and failures of their collaborative enterprise. This team becomes the support through which star performers are able to excel and maintain a sense of control over their own futures.

Ownership
Most principals assume their stars want at least partial ownership in the business. That’s generally a safe assumption, but it bears detailed discussion and negotiation with the stars. Principals and star performers don’t always see eye to eye on when ownership should be offered and to whom.

Most stars are willing to wait for ownership, but become dissatisfied when they believe that promises continue to slip into the future. Such dissatisfaction can be avoided by giving leaders some genuine control over their future.

Becoming a principal should require clearly defined accomplishments: goals that the star knows she has the power to achieve. These goals may not be the same for technical stars, but a parallel path toward an "associate" position should also be laid out.

The best tool to build commitment between the owner and star performer is a written agreement that sets out performance targets and other terms that make it clear what stars must do to earn a share in ownership or the role of associate. Terms of such an agreement may include:

• Her role and responsibilities as a leader or technical associate for a specific team or division.
• Specific annual marketing goals over a set period (3 to 5 years or more) for her team – including number of new clients, repeat business sales, gross revenues, and profit margins each year.
• A compensation plan including base salary and benefits, plus profit-sharing levels and bonuses tied to annual team performance.
• The level of equity accumulation tied to performance and time of service.
• The amount of continuing education in particular areas that must be completed on the star’s own time.
• Measurable criteria to evaluate high quality project performance and client satisfaction.
• Responsibilities on the part of the firm’s ownership to provide management support, track performance, and ensure high standards of project delivery and client relationships are consistently observed.

If a star has achievable goals tied to concrete rewards, you can bet she’ll go after them. In this way, she not only knows when and how she’ll make principal or associate, she’ll feel like the achievement is within her control.

Support
Star performers need support to excel and feel satisfied with their positions. A star on the ownership fast track will quickly become dissatisfied if he feels he’s being held back by lack of support from management and the firm’s support staff.

A team leader needs the management tools — financial statements, accounting tools, and the training to use them — that will allow him to track his team’s success and make appropriate and timely decisions. He will often need training on how to effectively build and maintain productive relations with other managers and support staff.

He needs up-to-date, accessible databases, marketing and client research information as it is developed, and other informational resources.

He needs control of his own budget, a budget that relates rationally to his team’s markets and their profitability, so that he can make reasonable decisions about training, acquiring equipment, creating needed materials, and rewarding his staff.

Good support is vital. The best way to provide it to a star is to make him feel that its access is within his own control.

Status
The human need for recognition is part of what drives talented individuals to become stars. But what distinguishes a true star is her ability to celebrate her team’s success as the true measure of her own success.

A company does best in a star system when it recruits and promotes a real team-builder as a star – one who burnishes her own reputation and status as one of the best through her relentless promotion of her team’s accomplishments. Promoting prima donnas who seek the status of success as a personal triumph rather than the triumph of successful collaboration, conversely, dilutes a firm’s success.

Typically, a company needs more than one star to thrive. That means the firm needs a system for celebrating the success of one star’s team without detracting from that of another star’s team.

Too much emphasis on promoting an individual’s star status can undermine the commitment of other (non-star) players on the team. It can also foster an unhealthy attraction to organizational perks among key players in the company.

Competition for titles, prime office space, substantial bonuses, company cars, personal parking spaces, and other perks has long been a problem within the A/E/C industry.

Successful firms have found that the best way to avoid competition for these expensive symbols is to make each star responsible for the profit or loss of her team’s business activity and tie the team’s success to the star’s success. Stars who control their own budgets, including the amount of total office space assigned to their teams, will quickly focus on using their dollars and space as efficiently as possible. Perks are viewed by talented team leaders and technical stars in the context of overall profitability and value to the team’s success. Symbols that won’t help the bottom line are more likely to be discarded.

Still, even stars focused on achieving a profit goal care about status, and so do their team members. So, a company that generates good internal and external PR that promotes the star’s team successes will achieve substantial rewards in loyalty at little cost. (See discussion under "Credit" above.)

Organizational Culture
The best culture for finding and growing stars while keeping the firm profitable and other good employees committed is an entrepreneurial one.

In describing what it takes to nurture stars and earn their loyalty we’ve alluded to the type of firm we mean: a high-performance organization comprised of market-focused, cross-functional teams that are recruited and led by stars.

This type of culture is actually like several different business activities operating under the umbrella of a single organization.

To avoid internal conflict between business activities, organizations must establish policies that effectively eliminate competitive overlap between teams. Guidelines are needed for spinning off new profit centers where recognized new stars can create their own teams and opportunities for success.

Most of all, companies that intend to succeed must create a culture that recognizes, supports and rewards the autonomous success of entrepreneurial teams, so that each team becomes a self-motivating prescription for success.

Summary
Star performers are much more than highly skilled technical workers or good project managers: they are leaders who build teams around a core group of clients who in turn enjoy working with them.

They offer exciting opportunities for expanding your company’s core business and revamping the way it delivers its products and services. The trick is understanding what distinguishes a star performer from a good worker. The process does not come without risks.

You may lose a few good workers who see themselves as stars, but are not. And, you may lose a few technical stars who want to be leaders. You can’t make every talented person the head of his own team.

Star performers will know they need to keep good team members happy and will work to keep them on-board by creating success through them and by celebrating their successes.

True stars are a rare commodity. Nurture them. Respect them. Give them the opportunity to make your firm a star.

About the Authors...
Karen Roper, SMP, MBA
Owner of Strategic Solutions in Bellevue, Washington, Karen Roper has helped engineers, architects, environmental scientists, and other members of the construction community work their way through marketing, operations, and communications challenges since 1978. Her views on the needs of star performers result both from her years as a member of the management team in some of our industry's largest firms and as a consultant to these and a variety of other firms. She can be reached at 425.746.4966 or at roperk@eskimo.com.

Alan Lambert is the owner of The Atropos Project (named for one of the three Greek Goddesses of fate), a management and marketing resources network that works with successful small and mid-sized A/E/C companies who want to grow. Prior to forming TAP in 1996, Lambert spent more than 20 years in the A/E/C industry, the last 15 of which were as a marketer and manager for three major A/E firms in the Midwest and the Northwest.