Leadership Minute: Do Your Leaders Grow Talent, Or Fear It?

There are three ways companies can handle rising stars. You don't want your company to take the wrong approach

One of the most revealing characteristics of a company’s culture is how leaders manage upwardly mobile talent. There are three approaches to this, which I’ll order from least effective to most effective:

• Star Stifling

• Catch and Release

• Pure Meritocracy

I have experienced all three approaches directly, and I know firsthand how hard it is to be a Pure Meritocracy all the time. But every leader should aspire to, at minimum, avoid falling into the Star Stifling category and vacillate between Catch and Release and Pure Meritocracy.

This issue has an enormous effect on a company’s trajectory. It’s especially hard for Star Stiflers to grow because their best people always leave for new opportunities because they hit a ceiling relatively quickly.

Conversely, the most successful business I have seen use some combination of Catch and Release and Pure Meritocracy. While this might mean that some talented people leave these organizations, combining these approaches sets the best balance between the needs of the organization and the individual. You’ll understand why as you read more about each.

Star Stifling

Star Stifling organizations don’t invest in their star talent. In fact, Star Stifling leaders often see talented junior employees as a threat; they’ll often actively stunt their people’s growth by withholding high-leverage projects, not offering development opportunities, or not highlighting their performance to senior leadership.

The employees who last at Star Stiflers have mastered the company’s political game and can often coast on subpar performance. Star Stiflers are often where talent goes to die—and mediocrity just tries to hang on long enough to retire—which is why these companies almost always stagnate.

My first job after college was at a Star Stifling firm. Anyone with talent left the organization and had an amazing career, while the incumbents led the company into bankruptcy and were largely forced to retire with very few marketable skills.

Catch and Release

A Catch and Release organization invests in its people and takes pride in their growth inside the company. However, these organizations also recognize when rising stars have better opportunities outside of the company and encourage them to pursue those roles when they know their development is limited internally. 

A great example of the Catch and Release approach is the culture Patty McCord built as Chief Talent Officer at Netflix. McCord and Netflix recognized that several of their top performers would eventually run out of room to advance at the company. Knowing this, they created a culture of open employee transitions, where it was a source of pride for people to go elsewhere and “be from Netflix.”

A Catch and Releaser also understands the consequences when there are multiple people vying for a single leadership role. There is often the understanding that if a candidate for a senior role is not selected, they will want to pursue that same level of role at another organization—and will find substantial demand for their services. The right answer is to support them to help make that happen.

Sometimes, the Catch and Releaser makes the correct calculation when they let someone leave—the employee truly isn’t ready for a step up, and their subsequent performance with their next employer proves that.