Dr John Sullivan Talent Management Thought Leadership

They call them high-impact employees because they have the largest impact on business results. The impacts they produce may double when these high-value employees (HIE) work in a high-impact position (HIP). This makes the tandem of high-impact employees working in high-impact positions the strategic goal that every smart talent leader needs to adopt.

Identify High-Impact Employees (HIE) By The Impacts That They Produce

The NFL calls those that significantly influence the outcome of a game impact players or game changers. Because each designated player will already have a track record of influencing team wins. In the corporate world, I label these difference makers as “High Impact Employees” (HIE). You identify them based on their track record of providing important impacts. The impacts that typically define a HIE are listed below. The primary defining impact is:

• Directly impacting and improving the current strategic results of your organization.

Additional defining impacts often include:

• Directly increasing your team’s probability of success.
• Shifting your team’s momentum and direction.
• Coming through at critical times when your team really needs it.
• Finding an innovative solution when there are few viable alternative solutions.
• Subtly encouraging others to initiate their own high-impact actions.
• Providing your team with a competitive or a first mover advantage.
• The impacts that the HIE has provided extend far beyond their own team.

In fact, an indicator of the growing value that is now being placed on those that produce significant impacts comes from Google. Whose executives recently recognized the value of high-impact employees. Adding a new “transformational impact” at the top performance level allows the company to effectively recognize and handsomely reward the handful of employees whose actions have literally transformed their team and how it operates.

The highest overall value will be generated when all of your “High-impact employees” are working in “high-impact positions.”

Maximize Your Business Impacts By Placing Your HIE’s In High-Impact Positions (HIP)

In the NFL, you quickly recognize those individuals who are labeled as “impact players.” Not coincidentally, these players always occupy slots known as “impact positions.” These positions earn this label over time, simply because most of the game-changing plays throughout the season come from those in these designated “impact positions.”

In the NFL, the highest-impact position is quarterback, and the lowest-impact one is the kickoff returner. However, identifying and prioritizing your high-impact positions has been difficult in the corporate world. This is partly because many HR functions have a recent history of treating all positions as though they were equal. Differentiating their treatment and pay based on performance has often led to charges of discrimination.

However, now that global business competition is intensifying, all HR processes, but especially recruiting, retention, and rewards, must consistently emphasize the expectation for a much higher level of performance.

You can learn more about position prioritization and which jobs are usually prioritized here.

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Maintain Your High Level Of Impact With These Recommended Actions

After you have identified your high-impact employees and made sure that they are working in high-impact positions, it’s important to understand that there are some additional actions that you should also take in order to maintain your current level of impact. Those talent management actions include:

Prioritize the filling of high-impact jobs – to ensure that your high-impact positions are always filled with high-impact talent. So now, whenever a high-impact position opens up, filling it needs to become a top recruiting priority. The first action under prioritization is to move the requisition to the head of the recruiting queue. Then, the HIP req must be assigned the best recruiters with the highest recruiting budget, and it must only use proven sources for this job. And when your recruiter determines that you have a high-impact candidate for a HIP. It’s important that you accelerate the processing of that candidate, increase your communications with them, and finally, make sure that they get the best candidate experience. Ideally, your organization will also develop and maintain a talent pipeline for this position to ensure that, in the future, this position can be filled quickly from your existing list of high-quality candidates.

Widen the reward differential between top and bottom performers – pay difference issues have dominated HR over the last decade. But it may now be the time to revisit the width of your pay differentials. Recently, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have all acted to increase the differential between the rewards offered to exceptional performers and those offered to those not meeting expectations. Widening the gap and providing exceptional bonuses and equity awards exclusively to those who perform at the highest level will make it crystal clear to every employee that maximizing performance is now both the team’s and the company’s top priority.

Act proactively to retain your HIE’s – because the strongest recruiters in most industries already know the names of your company’s high-impact employees. You can now expect to be continually raided by external recruiters. So, to retain your “keeper employees,” you should already be taking proactive retention actions. Including periodically holding “stay interviews” with each “can’t lose” employee to remind them how much they are appreciated and needed. But also to reinforce the “sticky factors” that keep them working at your company. And in the cases when you actually lose a high-impact employee. It’s essential that you utilize a delayed post-exit interview to find out the real reasons why such a valuable employee left.

Maintain your impacts by facilitating targeted internal movements – In our rapidly changing business environment, the positions with the highest strategic impact will constantly change (For example, tariff experts are suddenly highly impactful). So, it is critical that your internal employee movement process is capable of rapidly moving your MIEs to other teams and business units where they can have their maximum impact.

Final Thoughts

It’s important to periodically remind ourselves that having a volume of skilled employees on your team is not enough. It’s wishful thinking to expect an average employee to make an above-average contribution.

Instead, if you want to maximize your business impact, you need to develop a talent management process that effectively identifies your high-impact employees. Then, ensure this process effectively rewards, moves, and retains each HIE. At the same time, you are identifying a high-impact position that should be receiving priority treatment in recruiting.

It’s now clear that the highest value comes from this tandem: an impact player working in an impact position. Any questions?

Note for the reader

This is the latest article from Dr. Sullivan, who was called “the Michael Jordan of Hiring” by Fast Company.
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