The question isn’t “Are any of my people at risk?” The answer is always yes.
The question is: “What am I doing about it?”
Your top performers aren’t thinking about quitting because they’re underpaid. They’re thinking about it because they’re under-challenged. Every manager loses good people. The best managers lose fewer of them, and when they do lose someone, they know exactly why.
Here’s the math that should keep you up at night: replacing someone costs 50–200% of their annual salary when you factor in recruiting, onboarding, lost productivity, and knowledge drain. Your best people are worth even more than that because they’re also the hardest to replace.
So why do they leave?
The Three Reasons Top Performers Quit
- No growth path. They can see the ceiling. If you can’t show them what’s next, someone else will.
- Not challenged enough. A players want A problems. If you’re giving them B work, they’re mentally checked out already.
- They don’t feel seen. Not “appreciated” in the vague sense. Seen. As in: their manager understands their ambitions, advocates for them, and invests in their development.
Notice what’s not on this list: compensation. By the time someone quotes a competing offer, they’ve already decided to leave. The money just gave them permission.
No Growth Path
This is the easiest place for companies to do better. Many firms make it unclear what you need to do to advance, and your high performers are the ones who want to know — because they’re the ones trying to get to the next level. These are the people who scored the best grades, won the race, built the winning delivery. They want to know what a win looks like. When you don’t show them explicitly, you introduce uncertainty, and uncertainty is something a competitor can exploit.
It doesn’t even have to be a competitor. It can be a recruiter. A recruiter will show up and say, “You’re at level X. Here’s what level Y looks like at our firm.” Some of that pitch is money, but a lot of it is responsibility, opportunity, and career trajectory — whether they can use that next role as a springboard. Your high performers are the ones evaluating those kinds of moves.
The easiest thing you can do to combat this is to have some form of career rubric — a document that says, “Here are the dimensions we’re looking for. If you’re operating at this level, here’s how we see it. If you want to move up here, these are the capabilities you need to learn.” When you do this, you’re explicitly giving them a growth path. You’re talking about their future here, which gets them thinking about their future here and how to close the gap. That’s exactly the conversation you should be having.
This is something you can talk about in 1:1s and you can cover it quarterly. You don’t have to address everything at once — just a little bit over time so that you’re moving along this path together. That signals that you’re investing time and the firm is investing resources and opportunity into them. Most people respond when they understand that they’re being invested in.
Not Challenged Enough
Your high performers are the ones you have to challenge the most. Give them boring work or relatively easy problems and they’re the group that gets bored the fastest.
You need to let them have some input into their own roadmap — what they’re trying to accomplish both for themselves and for the firm. The best way to do this is to align their personal goals with the firm’s goals so they overlap, because that’s where you get the most passion for the work. This is something you can pull out of 1:1s. Ask what they’re interested in career-wise, what they’re interested in personally, their background — all of it is fair game to help you understand how this person is wired and what drives them.
If you understand what drives them, you can make informed guesses about what they’re really pushing for. Then you can align the opportunities and challenges you have with the things they want to accomplish. It’s a win-win setup.
But here’s the trick: you have to give them autonomy as they take on harder challenges. If you try to micromanage them, that’s a massive disincentive, and they will look to leave — both you as a manager and possibly the firm. Tell them what the mission is, not how to accomplish it. Let them determine the how. If you need to see a proposal because you’re not sure about their approach, ask for one — that’s entirely fair. But set it up so they can autonomously pursue the work and accomplish the mission.
You want this because it’s how you scale. If you’re not sitting there micromanaging, they can do their job to the best of their ability, and you can do more of yours. This is exactly how you grow your impact as a manager.
They Don’t Feel Seen
You also need to find ways for your high performers to get visibility for their actions and outcomes. Some managers make the mistake of taking all the credit for the team, and while managers certainly deserve some credit for the overall team effort, the best managers make sure their top performers get the visibility they need.
If you take all the credit all the time, they’re not going to do their best work for you — because they know they won’t earn any recognition externally. If you give them all the credit all the time, your leadership might think you’re not doing your job. Neither extreme works.
The key point is to rotate visibility. Think of it like a professional baseball team. The manager takes credit for the wins, but the starting pitcher takes credit for the strikeouts or pitching a perfect game. That doesn’t take away from the manager, because the manager is focused on the season. The starting pitcher is focused on that game, that pitch, that batter.
Better pitchers and batters help the team win individual games. String together enough individual games and you get a winning season. With a winning season, you’ll make the championship. That’s the leadership story you want to tell — one where everybody shares some of the visibility and is responsible for the team’s success.
Put Them on Hard Problems
Managing high performers is difficult precisely because they’re high performers. They tend to be your most experienced people, and if they’re young, they can be a bit brash.
Use it.
Put them on hard problems. Make them pitch that perfect strike to the All-Star on the other team. Tell them you’re counting on them to make that pitch. And if they don’t make it, don’t use it as a mechanism to humiliate them — use it as a mechanism for them to learn. The overall team is what helps win the game. Over time, they’ll understand why you’re the manager, what your job is, and how you help them while also helping the whole team.
The Math Again
Remember the number from the top: 50–200% of annual salary to replace someone. That’s the cost of the person you didn’t give a growth path to. The person you gave B work when they wanted A problems. The person whose wins you took credit for until they stopped caring.
The worst part is that you won’t see it coming. High performers don’t complain on the way out. They just leave. By the time you’re in a conference room trying to make a counteroffer, they’ve already mentally moved on. The counteroffer is for you, not them.
So go look at your team right now. Identify your top three people. Ask yourself:
- Do they have a clear growth path?
- Are they working on problems that challenge them?
- Do they have visibility for what they’ve accomplished?
If you can’t answer yes to all three, you’re not retaining them. You’re just borrowing time until someone else gives them a reason to go.
See you next week!
-Frank
