Page 191 - Retaining Top Employees

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The Role of the Manager, Part 2 179

ers. The simplest system is just to make sure other people
alert you when they are likely to be significantly impacted
by a top performer’s decision. This is not to suggest that
you put in place a network of snoops and snitches! Deal
with decision making openly and transparently. Just make
sure that in the case of large, significant decisions, your
employees have a safety net that alerts you to help them
examine the widest impact of those decisions.
• Put on “training wheels.” For a while, work with your top
employees when they’re making material decisions, in a
collegial collaboration. After they’ve learned how to con-
sider and assess all factors and potential effects in mak-
ing decisions, you can ease off on the decision-making
oversight.
• Support their decisions. The more you support quality
decisions and reinforce good decision-making behavior,
the more your top performers will develop the habit of
making “good” decisions.
Outside the Box
Thinking outside the box is an internalized version of the deci-
sion-making issue. The best employees are often experts at
thinking outside the box in order to attain their functional goals,
but much less so when it comes to non-operational matters.
Again, this is the flip side of their sharp focus on their

Welcome to Tech World
During the dot-com boom,I spent a lot of time working with
top employees in the tech world—predominantly programmers and
engineers. Most of them could overcome the most complicated tech-
nical problems and write code that would make a computer do almost
anything. However,when even the simplest issues arose “outside the
box,” like fund raising or employee supervision or even just docu-
menting what they were doing,their creative juices seemed to freeze.
And some of these people were genuine,certified geniuses. More
often than not,as the organization matured and became less flexible
and therefore less capable of dealing with such idiosyncrasies,the top
employees simply left.