How do you keep your top performers?

Looking back, there were usually signs. They stopped volunteering for things. They asked fewer questions about what came next. They were polite in one-to-ones in a way they hadn’t been before. None of it seemed urgent at the time.

This post is about what keeps strong people, why they drift, and how to see the drift while you can still do something about it.

Why do top performers leave?

Mostly because something they cared about went quiet, and nobody noticed in time. Pay is part of it. But strong people tend to start looking when they stop growing, stop being recognised, stop trusting that they’re treated fairly, or stop wanting to work for the person they report to.

The research backs this up. In a Pew Research Center survey of US workers who quit a job in 2021, the top reasons were low pay (63%), no opportunities for advancement (63%) and “feeling disrespected at work” (57%). Two of those three are about how people are led, not what they’re paid.

Gallup’s research suggests a lot of this is avoidable. In a 2019 Gallup article, Shane McFeely and Ben Wigert report that 52% of people who left voluntarily said their manager or organisation “could have done something to prevent them from leaving their job.” That’s more than half of the leavers saying the door was open to keep them.

We’ve written separately about what a bad manager costs a company, including the cost of replacing people. This post is about the step before that: keeping them.

Why is keeping top performers harder for senior leaders?

Because you’re further away. When you led one team, you saw your best people every day and heard when they were unhappy. Now you lead through other managers, and the signals reach you late, filtered, or not at all.

There’s a second reason. Strong people have options, and they know it. A recruiter can offer them more money in one phone call. What a recruiter can’t easily offer is the things you control: a clear path to bigger work, a leader who notices what they do, a place where the rules feel fair, and a manager whose former team members say good things about them. Those are what make people turn the call down.

At Coach42 we group those reasons into four areas. In our experience, most leaders are strong in two and quietly weak in the other two:

• Growth: whether your best people can see a bigger version of their job, and are getting closer to it.
• Recognition: whether people feel their good work is noticed, specifically and soon.
• Fairness: whether people trust that work, credit and chances are shared on merit.
• Reputation: whether people who’ve worked for you would tell a friend to join you.

Are your best people still growing?

If they haven’t taken on something new in the last six months, probably not. Top performers measure their careers in what they’re learning. When the job stops stretching them, they start looking for one that will.

The trap for senior leaders is that your strongest people are also your most reliable. You lean on them for the things that must go well, which are usually the things they already know how to do. From your side, it looks like trust. From theirs, it can look like being stuck.

Gallup’s finding about the months before people quit is telling here. McFeely and Wigert write that 51% of leavers said that in the three months before they left, no manager or leader “spoke with them about their job satisfaction or future with the organization.” If nobody is talking to your best people about their future, they’ll assume there isn’t one, and go and find it.

The move is simple, but it has to be deliberate. Once a quarter, ask each of your strongest people what they want to be doing in two years, and what one piece of work in the next three months would move them towards it. Then make sure they get it, even if it means someone less experienced picks up the reliable work they were doing. If you’re worried about who would cover, that’s a bench strength question, and worth answering anyway.

Do people feel their work is noticed?

Most people don’t, at least not often enough. Recognition is the cheapest thing a leader can give and one of the easiest to forget, especially once you’re a layer or two away from the work.

Gallup’s 2016 article on recognition found that only one in three US workers strongly agreed they had received recognition or praise for good work in the past seven days. It also found that people who don’t feel adequately recognised are “twice as likely to say they’ll quit in the next year.”

Top performers are especially easy to under-recognise, because good work from them is expected. When the strongest person on the team delivers again, it doesn’t feel like news. But to them, silence after a big effort reads as “nobody noticed”, or worse, “this is just what I’m for now”.

Recognition works best when it’s specific and close to the moment. “Great job this quarter” lands softly. “The way you handled the client call on Thursday kept that account, and I told the board it was you” lands hard. Try writing one message like that a week, to someone whose work you’ve seen through a manager’s report rather than directly. Copy their manager in, so the credit runs through them too.

Do your people trust that things are fair?

Fairness is the area leaders rate themselves highest on and teams often rate lowest. You know your reasons for every decision. Your team only sees the decisions.

Fairness isn’t about treating everyone the same. It’s about people believing that the interesting work, the promotions, the flexibility and the credit go to whoever earns them, not to whoever is closest to you. Strong people are sensitive to this, even when it works in their favour, because they know the same rules will apply to them next year.

The Pew finding about feeling disrespected matters here. People rarely quit over a single unfair decision. They quit over a pattern: the same few people always in the room, a promotion that nobody could explain, a rule that bends for some and not others.

The move is to explain your decisions out loud, especially the ones about people. When you pick someone for a visible project, say why, and say what someone else would need to show to be picked next time. It takes two minutes. It turns a decision people might resent into one they can work towards.

Would your former team members recommend you?

This is the question most leaders never ask, and it may be the one that matters most for attracting talent. Strong people check before they join. They ask around, and the people they ask are the ones who used to work for you.

Your reputation as a manager is what’s left after people stop reporting to you. It’s built from the other three areas: whether you grew people, noticed them and treated them fairly. But it has its own habits too. Do you stay in touch with people after they leave? Do you help them land their next role, even when it’s elsewhere? When someone resigns, do they leave feeling backed or burned?

You can’t see your own reputation directly, which is why it helps to ask. If you have a few former team members you’re still in touch with, ask one of them what they’d tell a friend who was thinking of joining you. Listen without explaining. If asking feels too hard, our post on finding out what your team really thinks of you has gentler ways in.

What does losing a top performer look like in practice?

Here’s a hypothetical example. A director leads four managers and about forty people. One of the senior engineers is widely seen as the strongest person in the department. Here’s her last year, from her side.

• Growth: she has run the same platform for two years because it can’t be allowed to fail. In January she mentions wanting to lead a new product area. The director says “let’s look at that later in the year”. Nobody raises it again.
• Recognition: in spring she leads a migration that goes perfectly. The update to the leadership team thanks “the platform team”. Her manager says well done in a one-to-one.
• Fairness: in summer a newer colleague is chosen to lead a visible project. There’s probably a good reason, but nobody tells her what it is.
• Reputation: a friend at another company asks what it’s like working for the director. She says “fine, but don’t expect to move fast”.

In October she resigns. The director is genuinely surprised and offers more money. She thanks them and leaves anyway.

Nothing in that year was cruel or careless. The director was busy and the platform was important. But each of the four areas went quiet in turn, and nobody asked her how she was seeing it. Four small moves would have changed the story: a dated plan for the product area, her name in the leadership update, a two-minute explanation about the project lead, and one honest conversation about her future before the summer.

Can you do too much to keep a top performer?

Yes. Holding on to someone who has genuinely outgrown what you can offer isn’t retention, it’s delay. If the next step they want doesn’t exist in your area, the best thing you can do is help them find it, inside the company if possible and outside if not.

There’s also a cost to the rest of the team. If keeping one person means bending rules, inventing titles or quietly handing them the best work every time, others notice. You might keep your star and lose three solid people who decided the game was rigged. That’s the fairness area working against you.

And remember that good people leaving well is part of a strong reputation. Some of your best future hires will come because someone who left you told a friend you were worth working for.

How strong is your pull as a leader?

Most leaders have one or two of the four areas that are doing far more damage than the rest. Knowing which ones lets you pick the right move instead of trying to fix everything at once, or reaching for a pay rise that doesn’t address the real reason.

Talent Magnet is a free test built for this. It takes about 5 minutes, needs no sign-up, and your answers stay in your browser. You answer 14 questions about how you lead, and you get a magnet score out of 100. It looks at the four areas in this post, growth, recognition, fairness and your reputation as a manager to work for, and shows your two weakest, each with one move to try.

For now, you rate yourself. A team version, where your team answers anonymously, is coming, and that will usually be the more honest view. Either way, the score isn’t a diagnosis or a verdict on you. It’s a prompt to look at the area your best people are most likely to be quietly missing.

If you’ve already lost someone and want a sense of what it cost, the Cost of a Bad Boss calculator will help. For a wider read on how you lead, including whether you tell people when you think they’re capable of more, try The 42 Test. You’ll find the other tests and posts for this stage on the senior leaders page.

Keeping top performers isn’t a programme. It’s a handful of conversations and small acts each month: a question about someone’s future, a specific thank you, a decision explained, a door left open for someone who leaves. Start with the area your best person would name first.