Developing high performers
👋Hi! I'm Molly. This is where I share the lessons I’ve learned from building fast-moving, messy, ambitious companies. For more from me, you can also find me on the WorkLife Podcast, on LinkedIn, and in Glue Club, a community for leaders who care about building great companies.
Most managers see high performers and just leave them alone because they are performing well. But I think high performers are where all the potential of a company lies. I try to spend the majority of my time on top performers to harness and expand their potential. When I work with them, they often end up in a role completely different from where they started — a better fit for them and the organization.
This is one of my strengths as a company builder and something I’m most proud of in my career. I measure my success by the number of people whom I have truly helped accelerate or shape their career trajectory. If you love to manage people, there’s a lot of joy in this work.
I also care about this type of work because it has been transformative to my career when people have done it for me. In a lot of ways, what is outlined in this post below is the same thing that a lot of my mentors and bosses did for me that I wrote about in this post. One of the first ones was Chamath, who saw me run a project on Facebook’s HR team as an individual contributor in my early twenties (the project was to define Facebook’s company values). He noticed some of my strengths and put the opportunity for some cool new roles in front of me. I ended up leading a project to build a mobile phone, and that put me on a whole new path – one that eventually led me to be a leader and operator at a series of startups.
I call that kind of role switch a J Curve. J Curves are stretch opportunities where you take on a role outside your comfort zone. In the best case, these roles make you feel like you’re on a whole different planet. They’re high risk, but if you succeed, they accelerate your growth like nothing else can.
These opportunities can be transformative for someone’s career trajectory but they are also very powerful for the company. They take someone with high potential and accelerate it. And if done well, they align your highest performers with your biggest priorities.
There’s nothing more magical than watching someone do things they didn’t know they were capable of. And it feels great to give the company an amazing new leader. You can nurture high performers from anywhere in the company — sometimes, the people I develop don’t report to me. And sometimes they’re external talent I recruit from a totally different industry.
From a company perspective, you have to do this if you want to retain high performers. If you’re not offering them exciting opportunities that scare them, they will get bored and leave.
I’m a strong believer in earned opportunities for people who do good work, so when a highly visible role opens up (e.g., chief of staff), it’s a great time to look internally for a high performer. Give these folks the first bite of the apple.
If a company is struggling financially, this is even more important. People’s personal growth path can often have a more powerful retention effect than the company’s success; people will stay if they feel challenged and valued enough. While often you can’t really control whether a company goes bankrupt or goes public, you CAN create customized growth plans for individuals by putting J Curves in front of them and providing support.
Some real-life examples
At one company, I noticed a young woman who was crushing some research projects and felt that she could be working on more mission-critical things. I identified her as a strong project manager by talking to her and watching her work. Then I gave her a series of test projects for central operational systems, like running performance reviews. We’d meet at the end of each project to debrief and I’d update my mental sketch of her skills. She went on to become an important “operator” inside the company — someone who helped run things like annual planning, all hands, etc.
I once met someone who impressed me with her amazing organization for an event I was part of. I thought she might make an amazing project manager or operations person, so I recruited her as an EA and she eventually ran all operations for one of the startups I was part of.
My team worked above a coffee shop and built a strong relationship with the manager of that store because we were there every day. We realized he had exceptional customer relationship skills, and eventually, we hired him to lead customer support for our startup.
When I started as COO in one of my jobs, I noticed that another senior exec was naturally dabbling in operations projects like goal setting because he enjoyed it. He was actually managing a very narrow part of the team but he quickly showed that he was very very talented at things like metrics and business operations. He didn’t think of himself as an operator and didn’t know he was good at it, but over time, through a series of tests and projects, we both realized he could basically do my job. I slowly had him lead projects in more central parts of the business and eventually take over bigger and bigger parts of the team.
Identifying a high-performer
The process begins when someone impresses me — they ship something that’s better than expected or crush a presentation. Maybe their name comes up a lot in some set of discussions or a perf cycle’s calibration.
