by by Margaret Butteriss, William Roiter

Chapter 1

Your Most Valuable Performers

You want all the talent that you can get in your business. You know that the more talent you have, the better your edge on the competition. In our work as executive coaches and leadership development consultants, we are often asked to find ways to recruit, develop and retain talented or high-potential employees. Business leaders recognize that one of their most important jobs is to match the right person to the right job, and then to build stable groups populated with these matches. Time and budgets are set to find and develop talent, yet retention of valuable talent is often left to what World War II pilots in a battered aircraft relied on when returning home--"a wing and a prayer." Businesses rely on compensation and potential for advancement, as the wing and the prayer is, as you would expect, still a prayer. Prayer is a valuable activity in your private life but it is no way to run a business.

A Management Need

A few years ago during the height of the boom economy, Tom, a senior executive from one of our client companies, asked us over a working lunch if we could help him address a major concern he had regarding the launch of a new product. The launch required a coordinated effort by many often-contentious departments, each department staffed by a good dollop of talented people driving the product to the launch point. Having just been told that a talented person from marketing had accepted an offer to jump to a new company, he was concerned that her example might create a hole in the dike; others might also choose to skip away with their critical product skills and knowledge, which had taken more than two years of on-the-job experience to create. Without the resources to match outside recruiting offers, Tom knew that he had to do something and do it fast. As all good consultants would do, we told him that, even though he wanted it good, fast and cheap, we could probably deliver only two of his three requests. He immediately chose fast and cheap for now, with good to follow after this product launch was successful.

The six-month launch cycle was a success. During our work with Tom we recognized that, while talent development and retention are important, it is critical to know your Most Valuable Performers and actively manage their development and retention in a manner that is specific to their needs. Over time, as we have talked with senior executive clients such as Tom, we have found that while concerned about the management of their MVP-class employees, managers cannot, typically, point to any specific plan for MVP recruitment, development and retention. They can readily talk about their programs for finding and keeping their "high potential" talent but cannot define a plan for keeping their MVPs. That is what put us on the trail of MVP management best practices, a trail that led to this book.

The Concept of the MVP

Of course, we did not originate the idea of recognizing MVPs. Baseball created the MVP award in 1910 and today most professional sports leagues offer a similar honor. The MVP award began as a marketing strategy by an automobile manufacturer. Since 1931 the Baseball Writers' Association of America has voted on and presented baseball's MVP award. The formal election process for baseball's MVP is based on thinking that is similar to that used by most business people to identify their MVPs. A clear and organized but subjective judgment is made.

Sports analogies abound in business, often enlightening and enlivening discussions, but we know that there are really no firm and fast rules to identify, to manage or to become a Corporate MVP. Edgar Schein, Professor Emeritus at MIT's Sloan School of Management, cautions us on an over reliance on sports analogies in the business environment. "The rules for sports are very clear while the rules for business are very unclear." Our challenge is to shed light on best practices for MVP management.

Convert Your Stars into Your MVPs

At a client meeting to coordinate employee performance measurement and compensation, we were looking for ways to ensure that top performers are rewarded for outstanding performance while also building the organization. The manager, new to the job after being a top performer, cautioned, "I don't want to create a star system here." He expressed a core concern of many managers who try to create "fair" incentive plans while trying to keep the best from outstripping the incentives and leaving little for the moderate and poor performers. A senior manager looked a little incredulous and asked, "Why not? I would love to have a department full of stars. If the top performers outperform, then we should want to reward them. We don't want to create a comfortable group of mediocre performers. We want a very happy group of top performers that the others aspire to become. And if the others don't have such aspirations, we'd want them to leave."

Managers have learned over time that "stars" can be disruptive and can create management problems with co-workers. Our MVPs fit the profile of stars in most ways but are different in an important way. Both are excellent performers, but MVPs also improve the people they work with and the organization in which they work. Stars are excellent performers but may discount the people they work with and diminish the organization in which they work.

Organizations do want stars; they just do not want "lone stars" who excel at the expense of others. It is our advice to embrace your top--your star--performers and work with them to help them become well-integrated members of the organization, to become MVPs.

The Central Questions

As you will see, MVPs exist in every type of business. We have polled many of our clients--successful senior management executives, Human Resource (HR) executives and MVPs themselves--and found that the MVP concept resonated strongly with them. They quickly pursued the line of thought and shared their MVP stories. This chapter describes how we identified and worked with these successful hands-on businesspeople, educators and scientists

How Do We Recognize and Develop MVPs?

We first had to determine who are and who are not MVPs. At what point does a talented person cross that abstract boundary and become an MVP? While MVP identification is ill defined, we found that all the people that we spoke with could quickly answer this question: "Can you tell me who your valuable people are and why?" We do not recall that it took anyone more than five seconds to say yes and begin telling us about their top 3, 5 or 10 most valuable performers. They quickly integrated the concept of MVPs and easily discussed their great value. We found that once senior executives and HR executives become aware that MVPs exist in a business, they begin to wonder how much value MVPs produce and whether this value should be safeguarded and increased. Chapter 2 will examine the value of the MVP. Since MVPs are "walking assets," an organization cannot lock them up at night. Safeguarding an organization's investment and future value in an MVP requires excellent management skills combined with proactive thinking and basic resource management. It is much easier to manage an MVP well than to stop an MVP from leaving or to replace one.