If you have not followed me for a while, I have about 14 employees total. Six of those employees are CEOs. They run their own multi seven-figure companies. And if you want to talk about managing high performers is difficult, CEOs suck. They’re needy, they’re fucking opinionated, they’ve got all these ideas, we’re never moving fast enough. Running a team of CEOs is hard. But all six, and we’ll be growing that number to 10 this year, they’re all CEOs. They’re all business owners, entrepreneurs, and those are guys, in theory and concept, some of the highest performers out there. Not all entrepreneurs and business owners are high performers. Most of them suck. Ours don’t. They’re great. But it’s difficult to not just build, but maintain and keep a high performing team. So, I’m going to do three points on this one.
First, you have to be the attractive character for high performers, which means you have to operate as a high performer. You have to build a process, a routine, an image, even the content. What story are you telling has to be around high performance. And there’s not a single way to do that. There’s not a single definition of high performance. There’s some introverts that are incredibly high performing. There’s some extroverts that are very high performing. There’s some unique people, athletes, non-athletes. There’s not a standard, we’ll say, avatar for high performance, but you have to be it at all times. If at any point people can’t trust that you’re actually a high performer, they’re not going to trust to be a part of your team. Winners want to win. Winners want to be a part of a winning team. A players want to be around A players.
So, if you want more A players, you’ve got a be an A player. If you’re attracting C players right now, I would start looking in the mirror. Are you taking care of your health? Are you taking care of your family? Are you taking care of your kids? Are you taking care of your company? Are you taking care of your body image? Are you brushing your teeth? Have you shaved this week? It might seem silly to you, but if you’re not portraying high performance, you are not going to attract high performers. Even in just the consistency of effort. If you’ve been following for any period of time, I release three podcasts and two or three YouTube videos a week for the last three years. I don’t miss, I don’t miss, I don’t not deliver, I never underdeliver on an expectation. And I promise you, I don’t always want to do that.
I’m sitting here with this dude for the next three hours. We’re going to shoot like 24 videos. I’m like, “I don’t fucking want to do this.” I don’t. But there’s a standard I’ve set of performance that high performers know you don’t always want to do it, but sometimes you just have to. You don’t have a choice. That’s what high performance looks like. High performance isn’t, “I want to be great all the time.” It’s, “I’m going to be great all the time no matter how I feel,” right? So, I think when you look at somebody who doesn’t take care of themself, is inconsistent, you’ve caught them in lies, those are people that an A player’s not going to want to be around you. Vice versa, if you can be consistent, if you can take care of yourself, if you can be, what I would consider, a total package approach to life. I’m not great at business and I’m on my third marriage. And I’m not judging people who get divorced, but that just shows a lack of consistency.
It shows a lack of delivery. It shows some general things that high performers who want to stay married may not want to be a part of. And look, there’s a lot of people who have gotten divorced that are high performers, too. I’m so tired of putting disclaimers in these damn videos because of you trolls. But there is not a single avatar to what high performance looks like. But if you are not attracting high performers right now, my first plan of action for you be look in the mirror. Where are you underdelivering in your own standards that you can take control of? And then, it’ll increase the quality of the candidates and the people that you start to attract. Two, once you find these people, once they are attracted, you want to keep them, right? Well, the best way to keep them is to show them why being a part of your mission is important to them.
The what’s in it for them. And I’ll tell you right now, it’s not money. Money is part of it. They have to know that they can support their family. They have to know they can do some things they want. But I’ll tell you right now, all of my CEO coaches, they’re on commission only. They only get paid. So, when they first started here, when they first signed up as a coach, there was no guarantee of income, but they showed up and they delivered, and that’s why their income has grown. But money’s not the biggest thing. It’s impact, it’s influence, it’s authority, it’s quality of life, it’s quality in the workplace, it’s enjoyment of the process. This is where we’re going, and this is the role you play. And when we get there, this is what you’re going to have. Well, here’s your process and progress of progression through the ranks, right?
Some people want leadership roles. Some people want to be appreciated differently. Some people want to make a bigger impact on the marketplace. Whatever it is, you have to understand. That high performer has a reason that they are going to show up when they don’t want to. And that’s how you find and keep and get and maintain high performers is they will do the work no matter how they feel. They just will. One of my coaches got hit with the hurricane, and his house got destroyed. And he still went to Orlando two days later and spoke from stage, represented the brand well, still got his coaching calls in, still ran his business. He doesn’t know what he is going to do yet because because he doesn’t have a house to go back to, but he’s still doing his job. You can’t do that if that person doesn’t understand why they’re going to do it.
And you have to understand what it is they want. High performers have a very clear vision, typically, of what they want in life. Not just in their business, but outside of life. I believe if you are growing a business where people’s life is to work, I think you’re going to attract in the incorrect people. I think you have to understand people work to have a life. And you have to have that approach. You have to have that balance. You have to have that flexibility in routine, flexibility in approach, flexibility in location sometimes, but there has to be a standard. You have to hold them to the standard, and I’ve talked about that already in other videos. But you have to have a very clear understanding of who they are, what they want, and where they want to get to. If a high performer shows up and then they say, “Well, I want to be able to lead a team of 12 sales reps one day,” and you don’t have a plan to have a team of 12 sales reps, you should not hire that person.
Even though they may be the best suited for you short-term, they will not enjoy working for you long-term. And most of us are building long-term strategies for our business. So, get really intentional at understanding who they are, what they want, where they want to go, and how you are going to get them there. I do that with specific onboarding questionnaires for employees as very specific onboarding training. I use 30, 60, 90 day progression processes to make sure people ramp appropriately, and I understand them better. And then, I do weekly. Sometimes, it’s weekly, sometimes it’s biweekly, with all of my key high performers. It’s not everybody on the team, but everybody on the team is on the team calls every week where I pour into them. But I have conversations with people at least once a month, twice a month, maybe even every week around, “How are you doing? Where are you at?”
“Are we moving the right direction? Am I holding you to a high enough standard? Are you evolving enough to maintain part of the mission?” And if the answer is no, I’m going to fire you. And I look at it as I’m setting you free to go find something that you can be passionate about. Because I’m not here to just pay you money for half-assed effort. We either full ass or we no ass. There’s no half-assing around here. And that’s the rule we operate by. We go full ass on this stuff. But understanding that high performer wants to know that there’s an outcome on the other side of the struggle, the sacrifice, the effort, the discipline, the mental toughness, that there’s a reason they’re doing that with you. And it’s not for you. I think this is a common thing. “Oh, well, you work for me.”
If you ever fucking look at me and tell me, “Well, Mike, I sign your checks,” you’re not going to need to sign any more checks for me. I don’t work for anyone. And I’ve had some leaders pull that on me because I was a high performer, and I worked really hard and I had a lot of success and that success came with me wanting my opinion to be heard, and it wasn’t. And when I would push back, I would get put in my spot, and they would lose me. Because the minute you put me in that position where I work for you, no. A high performer works with you. There’s a hierarchy, there’s a chain of command, but high performers need to know that they’re working with somebody, not for someone. That way they’re brought in, they feel a part of the strategy, they feel a part of the tip of the spear because that’s where the high performer wants to be.
And then, the third is the accountability side, right? So, we’ve attracted the right characters, we’ve onboarded them, we’ve understood what they want, we’ve sold the mission really effectively, we’ve used personality tests and core values and onboarding strategy to make sure that we have the right people. Now, the accountability comes in. You, as a leader, need to look, I feel, need to look for ways to have conversations most people are not willing to have. I’m going to attack any reason that a high performer may not be able to maintain performance. If you’re not doing a good job in your exercise, I’m going to call you out on it. If you’re drinking too much, I’m going to call you out on it. If your standards at work are dropping, I’m going to call you out on it. If your body language isn’t right, I’m going to call you out on it. And not like, “Dude, get your shit together.” It’s like, “Hey, man. I’m seeing this. This is what I’m perceiving. Help me understand.” But I think if you’re not proactively holding those people to a higher standard, they eventually will burn out and not want to be there anymore because maintaining them is the key. You don’t want to constantly be replacing employees all the time. You want to be able to attract, onboard, train, and hold accountable to make sure that everybody is continuing to evolve. I said it earlier in another video, but if the mission is going like this and you hire somebody here, right? This person might be ahead of where you are now, but as you continue, if they don’t grow, that delta, that gap between where you are and where they are now. I’m going to make sure you keep up because I’m moving fast, right? My business is evolving quickly. Between 2019, 2020, 2121, and 2022, my business grew 300% every year.
And to put that into context, it was a hundred grand to 300 grand to a million to 3 million. That’s the progress. And next year we’re actually going to take a little bit of a slower growth year to stabilize a little bit and prioritize profit a little bit more. But 2023 will not be as big of a percentage of growth. But that’s massive growth for most companies, which means we’ve evolved very quickly, which means we make changes quickly, which means we’re improving the client experience on a more rapid pace, which means the employees have to keep up. This is where I think people have a misconception of high performers. They actually need more standards than everybody else. I’m going to tell you why. Someone who doesn’t give a shit if they’re high performing or not, or exceeding expectation or not, or they’re going to come in and they’re going to work hard to their standard of hard, no matter what. A high performer wants to know, needs to know what the standard is so that they can exceed it.
They need to know they’re living up to expectations, need to know because they stress about it. That’s part of what makes them a high performer is they’re hyper focused on meeting and exceeding expectations. Well, if you don’t give them a lane, you’re just like, “Hey man, you were killing it over there. You’re here now. Good luck. Talk to you next month.” They’re going to fail. They’re going to flounder. You’re going be like, “What the hell happened? This dude was such a high performer.” It’s because someone probably gave him very clear standards and expectations so that that person knew when they were meeting and exceeding expectations. So, high performers actually need more of a lane, more standards, more performance KPIs than a non-high performer. It’s just the truth because non-high performers don’t care if they’re exceeding or meeting. They’re going to do their best they can, and they’re going to go home.
They’re going to work nine to five, and they’re going to collect their paycheck. And that’s okay. Every team needs some B players. But if you want to keep that high A plus player, that high delivery, high expectation, you’ve got to give them high expectation. You’ve got to hold their ass accountable to it. Those are the tough conversations, right? Because that person’s typically opinionated, probably good at talking, probably great with words, probably emotional. Those are people, because that’s what keeps them high performing, is they’re addicted to the grind, they’re addicted to the growth. It’s your job to pour into them. You cannot be too busy to meet with your high performers on a regular basis, or you will lose them. Because you’ve got to attract them, you’ve got to onboard and train them, and you have to maintain and retain them. And the best way to do that is continue to pour into them, continue to evolve them.
I do that through one-on-ones. I do that through performance reviews. I do that through quarterly SWOT analysis. I do that to make sure that I’m holding them to a standard no one else ever has. And that’s why myself, Mike Claudio, and WinRate Consulting gets the results we do with other CEOs and business owners because I’m going to hold you to a standard that you didn’t even know you were capable of, and I’m going to help you get there. That’s what high performers want, and that’s what keeps high performers coming back. Yes, there has to be monetary value to that effort, but it’s not what’s going to keep them. Money is not the number one motivating factor for most high performers.
So, understand that.
Build a system around that. Build a process around tha.
And you’ll continue to attract, onboard, and retain high performing teams so that you can get your mission to the next level.
Because all I do.
All I want is for you to WIN FAST AND WIN OFTEN!
