Yamuna Baburaj, Widener University – How Companies Can Best Utilize Star Employees
On Widener University Week: Star employees are a boon to a company, but only if they pass on what they know to others.
Yamuna Baburaj, assistant professor of management, explores how to best integrate top talent.
Dr. Yamuna Baburaj is an assistant professor of management in Widener University’s School of Business Administration. She received a PhD in Strategic Management from Drexel University. She has taught courses in international business and management at Widener since 2017.
How Companies Can Best Utilize Star Employees
Companies often depend on star employees to sustain a competitive advantage and even change their fortunes.
Star employees are top performers serving as repositories of technical, industry, and firm knowledge and have significant visibility in the external market, but they often change jobs frequently and may take key team members or customers with them when they depart.
Consequently, less prepared companies suffer a severe blow when such talent leaves.
My colleague and I explored ways in which companies can leverage the star performer capital and protect themselves against these situations by effectively integrating stars into their organizations.
The research shows star performers who collaborate with other employees or have a breadth of expertise in several areas contribute much more to the overall development of the organization’s innovation than stars who rarely collaborate.
When stars collaborate with their colleagues in innovative ways, the latter’s new knowledge becomes part of the organizational memory and the impact of a stars’ exit is felt less severely.
The key to success for companies is to design their work structure, hiring, performance evaluations, cultural values, cultivating teams of excellence, adopting a non-star philosophy, and designing compensation and reward systems so that they favor knowledge sharing, collaboration, and a greater loyalty to the organization as a whole.
By reducing dependence on such performers and investing in developing pools of distributed expertise, a star’s departure can be viewed not as a company failure or crisis, but as an opportunity for the company to follow new research avenues that were not considered before and to incentivize other employees to pursue new research directions.
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A Superstar employee is not at that status solely because of performance metrics. They are there also because of their personality; vivacous, outgoing, thorough – pick your favorite descriptions; a personality which attracts people, makes and keeps customers and under the best of circumstances makes fellow employees want to work with and for the Superstar.
As you said, a Superstar may take customers with her when she leaves and cause a company to lose customer base. What this really shows is that a company can change its’ best practices to emulate the best things the Superstar brings to the job but one cannot teach personality and the awesome abilities a Superstar has to build a new customer base and cement existing customers. The danger is that if the organization doesn’t keep the Superstar happily compensated (in whatever forms that may take under the organization circumstance) he may leave and erode the customer base and affect the bottom line. The other danger is marginalizing the Superstar in the process of trying to spread his expertise to others. This may encourage the Superstar to leave. One must encourage a Superstar to take on more reponsibility and ask her to teach her best practices to others.
As corny and outdated as it may be, a show of support, encouragement, great pay and benefits and LOYALTY from management to a Superstar employee may be all it takes to keep her and keeps her excited to work in that company. Excitement can be contagious!
Top management needs to stop messing with a Superstars’ direct manager, which is what you seem to be extolling; micromanaging from above. Those who work in direct managemt get to know who are Superstars and at which task(s). They need to encourage the Superstar , add more responsibiliy when needed or when requested by the Superstar but also know when the Superstar is ready to go to the next level in the organization; and encourage her to do so.
I have been a supervisor, a manager, a Superstar, a union Steward and Chief Steward and I am now retired. I retired from a public university.
If organizations start to become loyal to and take care of their Superstars, their Superstars will show loyalty and bring even more to the betterment of the organization.
Matthew Leber
Ware, MA
Matthew Leber
partsbiz001@yahoo.com