You want to work in an organization with a vision and a growth plan. You want to work in a culture that prioritizes the personal and professional development of its employees. The reason I know this is because:

People want to think about their future with growth.

Think about it. If I told you who you are and that your current skills are the best you will ever have, does that sound appealing? If I told you that the company you work for will only shrink from here on out, how excited would you be to go to work?

The answer in both cases is that you would be disappointed and maybe even a little depressed.

Move the Middle

In “Building the Best,” I defined culture as “the shared values and beliefs that guide thinking and behavior.” Whether your company has intentionally created culture or not, it still exists.

Training leaders must be the flag bearer for creating a growth culture obsessed with developing high performers. Unfortunately, many companies focus on raising the floor instead of lifting the ceiling, which means controlling the output of low performers rather than moving the middle to high performance. Every organization or team consists of three categories:

• High Performers
• Medium Performers
• Low Performers

Imagine all the employees in your organization as a line. On the far right side are your high performers, roughly 15%. These team members are committed, hardworking, self-motivated, embrace learning and exhibit outstanding leadership. The middle 70% are medium performers. They are reliablepunctual, team-oriented, eager to learn and trustworthy. However, they don’t currently have the will or skill to be excellent 100% of the time. Your low performers are the final 15% on the left side of the line. They are there to collect a paycheck. They have moments that make you think they are progressing but regress because of a lack of effort. They tend to be uninterested in learning and development and lack passion for the industry, their work or achieving their potential.

While the makeup of high performers, medium performers and low performers might not precisely be 15%-70%-15% in your organization, the point is that too many training professionals spend an excessive amount of time, energy and effort trying to help their low performers be more productive, instead of helping their medium performers become like high performers and helping their high performers make an even more significant impact. If you want to be a part of a learning culture that fuels performance and employee growth, here’s how.

1.  Assess Skills Against High Performers

The number of companies that undervalue assessing their high performers is shocking. They tend to think that their highest performers are in a class of their own and that their attributes are genetic instead of developed.

While it’s possible that genetics play a factor in their success, they have worked hard to develop their skills. A skill is the ability to choose and perform the right techniques at the right time with minimal effort.

If you want to move the middle and create a culture of learning, assess the skills of your highest performers and assess the needs of each individual learner. One of the principles of our Accelerate Leadership Program is, “Someone’s best performance tomorrow requires personalized coaching today.” Build or leverage assessments to get a picture of the skills of your people to know and then teach what the highest performers have mastered.

2.  Develop High Performers

Assessing your workforce and showing them the results is a good first step, but it doesn’t change behavior. The best athletes have coaches and are constantly looking for ways to improve, as should your team members. Another way to think about it is:

Stop asking people to be leaders and high performers; show them how.

As if that weren’t enough, adapting to a rapidly changing market by learning new skills, models, and production methods is essential. Alvin Toffler said it well: “The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

The best organizations today think of themselves as universities whose responsibility is to provide opportunities to support the growth and development of their people. A few popular and effective approaches to this include:

• Cohort Based Learning Programs
• Virtual Group Coaching
• 1-1 Performance Coaching
• Simulations using AI or Headsets

3. Retain High Performers

The best part is that many efforts to develop high performers will also help retain them. In fact, organizations with a strong learning culture have 30-50% higher retention rates, and 94% of employees say they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development. So, investing time and money into your people will contribute to their retention.

However, don’t stop there. Beyond being compensated well, employees must feel recognized and appreciated in today’s business environment. William James said, “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.”

The best training professionals empower and encourage everyone, from the CEO to front-line employees, to give recognition privately or publicly when team members exceed performance standards. Some great examples include:

• Handwritten thank you cards
• Callouts when someone is excellent in a workshop
• Personalized gift cards to top participants
• Specialized time off

Closing

Working in an organization that has a culture of high performance and prioritizes the growth of its employees isn’t a nice thing; it’s a must. The companies that fail will be on the slow path of decline, while the companies that succeed will make incremental growth gains.

Remember, people want to think about their future with growth, so choose wisely.