How To Keep High Performers Motivated

Here’s an uncomfortable truth about the current world of work:

High performers need organizations less than organizations need high performers.

Performance in work has always followed a power law or “pareto” distribution. Everyone on the team contributes to the victories, but high performers who act as team players make the victory more likely. In one analysis of over 600,000 workers from dozens of different fields, high performers were found to achieve 400 percent more than average workers.

But to unlock those achievements, high performers need to be motivated to perform and motivated to work as a team.

In this article, we’ll review seven methods leaders can use to keep high performers motivated and achieving.

Share Meaning

The first method to keep high performers motivated is to share meaning. A lot of organizations attempt to give meaning to their people by promoting a “mission statement.” But often these jargon-filled scrawls about creating shareholder value and disrupting industries aren’t received as meaningful.

While people want to work for a purposeful organization, most people get a sense of meaning from doing work that benefits others. And high performers are no different. The most effective way to tap into this is to turn the “why” into a “who” — rather than relying on the organizational mission or vision to motivate for you, focus on the specific individuals or groups that directly benefit from the team’s work. Leaders who create this sense of “prosocial” purpose lead teams that are not only more motivated but also more bonded to each other, which is to say it directly benefits others.

This could be by connecting them with customers or stakeholders more often, or by sharing thank you notes and words of praise from leaders in the organization with the whole team. Anything that helps high performers know their work matters will also help keep them motivated.

Describe the End Goal

Another method to keep high performers motivated is to describe the end goal clearly. High performers in particular can become frustrated or disengaged when they’re given vague tasks or unclear objectives — they want to know what “done” looks like and why it matters. By describing the end goal concretely, you give them a tangible target that motivates individuals and provides a sense of purpose. This is especially useful in ambiguous and volatile times when the path forward isn’t obvious.

One valuable concept here is communicating the “Commander’s Intent” — a term from military strategy that refers to a clear and concise statement defining what the desired end state looks like. Sharing the Commander’s Intent allows high performers to understand the goal well enough to adapt their approach independently as circumstances change, which not only motivates them but also fosters a sense of autonomy and ownership over how they get there.

Build Connection

The third method to keep high performers motivated is to build connection.

Specifically, it is to build authentic connection between high performers and the entire team. Building authentic connection involves more than just making sure everyone knows each other’s name and assigned roles. It means getting to know each other on a deeper, more holistic level. Research suggests that when people build connections via mutual interests outside of work, they are more likely to develop real friendships.

And real friendship at work help everyone become better. Having friends at work makes people more motivated, less likely to quit, and more likely to find solutions to problems faced on the job. In building those connections, smart leaders don’t just force people into “reco-mandatory” team-building activities. Instead, they create genuine opportunities for self-disclosure—often through unstructured moments like shared meals or structured discussions designed to let people talk about nonwork topics…. which eventually makes them more than just colleagues.

Create Safety

The fourth method to keep high performers motivated is to create safety—specifically psychological safety. As high performers are interacting with you and the rest of the team, everyone should feel safe to express their ideas, take risks on projects, and speak up when they disagree.

Teamwide, psychological safety helps create a learning culture that helps everyone find better ways of working, explore more solutions to potential problems, and give each other feedback that improves performance.

A practical way to reinforce this safety is in how the team handles failures. Failures are inevitable in any team or project, but the way you handle them has an outsized impact on motivation. Instead of assigning blame, leaders can help extract lessons from setbacks and encourage transparency about what went wrong. This signals to the whole team that mistakes are opportunities for growth rather than occasions for punishment — and that learning-through-failure mindset actually taps into a sense of growth and mastery, both of which are powerful triggers for intrinsic motivation.

For high performers, psychological safety is especially important because they’ll want to know their opinions and ideas are included—but also because we’ll want to remind them not to discount the opinions and ideas of others who may help them find even better methods of performance.

Give Autonomy

The fifth method to keep high performers motivated is to give autonomy. It has been known for decades that autonomy—having the freedom to determine how to work, where to work, when to work, and more—is a strong driver of intrinsic motivation. So, it shouldn’t surprise any leaders that giving high performers more autonomy will keep them more motivated.

But in a knowledge work organization in an ever-changing environment there’s one other truth that leaders shouldn’t find surprising: high performers probably know better. If they’re more attached to the work being done, they probably have a better idea of how to get it done well than someone who has been in a supervisor role for five to ten years.

One practical way to extend autonomy without losing visibility is to involve the team in setting their own milestones. You may not always be able to choose the end goal, but teams can look at their expected deliverables and create their own series of checkpoints that help them feel more in control of the project. These self-set milestones also serve as progress markers — and research shows that a sense of progress is itself one of the most powerful motivators at work. When high performers can see that they are moving forward, they stay engaged.

Celebrate Small Wins

An often-overlooked method for keeping high performers motivated is to celebrate small wins — acknowledging and appreciating progress made by individuals and the team, no matter how incremental. High performers can be especially susceptible to tunnel vision, pushing hard toward a distant goal without pausing to register how far they’ve come. Celebrating small wins corrects for that, and reinforces the sense of progress that keeps intrinsic motivation alive.

Wins worth celebrating can be even smaller than milestone completions — a good day, a task done well, a moment of great collaboration, or help received from a teammate. Celebrations can take many forms: a team gathering over food or drinks, a round of emails praising the achievement, or simply acknowledging the win in a team meeting. The key is consistency. High performers who feel seen and appreciated for progress along the way are far more likely to stay motivated through the full arc of a challenging project.

Provide Growth

The final method to keep high performers motivated is to provide growth. Providing growth and development opportunities to high performers really means two things. The first is fighting for them to get noticed in the organization and given the resources or access to trainings to develop. The second is having open and honest conversations with them about their career goals and how you can help support them. If your organization employs highly-skilled finance or accounting professionals, transparent conversations about compensation are essential to maintain motivation among top performers. Sharing reliable resources about industry benchmarks, such as recent trends in CPA salary data, allows managers to address questions around pay equity and career growth—key factors that impact employee retention and engagement. And that second one is quite a bit harder than the first.

Open and honest conversation means growth talks beyond the formal review process—because how often can you be truly honest in a conversation that’s heavily documented? It even means knowing about, and still being supportive of, high performers whose growth plans may require leaving your team or organization. Few people still manage to have a career inside one organization. The average length of tenure is getting shorter and shorter, and leaders who recognize that and still stay committed to helping their people grow, will be rewarded with people who stay motivated.

What all of these methods have in common is that they require a mindset shift. Just as organizations need to recognize that high performers don’t need organizations as much as organizations need them, smart leaders recognize that high performers don’t “work for” them. Instead, high performers—and all their people—work with them. Leaders’ core job is to get their people what they need to do their best work. And this servant leadership mentality helps them do their best work ever.