Are You a Superstar Employee (Or Do You Manage One)?
Are you a superstar employee? Do you strive to be one, or did you used to aspire to be one? On the flip side, do you manage a superstar employee (or several)?
For a lot of people, I know, in the years after the pandemic, life became more about working to live than living to work. We talked about disengaging instead of quitting, and shared tips on staying engaged with your career.
Against this background, you wouldn't think it would be hard to stand out if you were still interested in being a superstar employee — but The Wall Street Journal (gift link) recently had an article for managers on “whether “superstar employees are worth it.” I was particularly intrigued to see that career experts have identified an ideal career “evolution” for such superstar employees, “to get the most out of stars.”
Superstar Employees: The Solo Years
The researchers found that young stars had great output (in one study, measured by comparing numbers of patents amongst employees) that “peaked at 20 to 25 years into their career, with an average 35% drop in output every 10 years therafter.”
During this “establishment” phase, they postulated that employees were trying to make a name for themselves, and managers' should “shield them from distracting tasks and red tape [with a support team or assistant to take care of everyday work]. Leaders should also give young stars a lot of leeway, giving them assignments that play to their strengths and aspirations, keeping them invigorated. And stars should get exclusive access to senior leadership as mentors.”
(This is also interesting because I wonder who wouldn't excel given those tools, especially compared to peers who don't have the same perks.)
After the Superstar's Peak
But, as noted, superstar employees peak — at least as far as solo work is concerned. The studies showed that superstar employees could become great mentors and experts, and in studies were more motivated to mentor. They suggested that bosses should give these fading superstars “formal training and coaching for that role. They should collaborate with stars to figure out how the top performers want to transition to a leadership role.”
They continued,
Then, bosses should put stars alongside younger, high-potential employees, and reward them for both their own output and their positive impact on mentees’ performance and retention. Bosses might also track stars’ performance with metrics like the number of promotions among mentees and improvement in mentees’ performance rating.
Have you found that your careers have evolved this way, readers? If you manage people, do you recognize these evolutionary steps? Do you find that people get “stuck” at certain stages, or fail to make the leaps, either due to burn out, a changed attitude, or more? How do you think this specifically plays out for women in the workplace?
Vector illustration via Deposit Photos / Soifer.
not me, but DH is a ‘superstar’ employee. i would never brag about him in real life, but feel safe doing it on the internet. he is a top performer, the numbers speak for themselves, but i will kind of agree with the above that ‘superstar’ individual contributors need coaching/training on how to be good leaders/managers if you want them to succeed in managerial roles. Too few companies seem to provide employees with what they need to make that transition
maybe you’re right but it would never occur to me to be so sure about someone who i don’t work with myself.
Same; I’m not but my husband is. However he’s in a field (academia) where the metrics for success are very different than in traditional office jobs. He is brilliant and has good people skills for an academic but I don’t know that he would have been very successful in the corporate world.
I am a ‘superstar’ employee (no this is not my own opinion I have consistently been in the top 3 staff every year based on evaluations and statistics), but I think it’s sort of a nothing burger? Some people just have different skills while mine are technical others are more adept in interpersonal stuff. I would be a terrible manager, I am really bad at differentiating between weaponized incompetence and genuine confusion which is a big no no in pushing people to succeed.
I also am a superstar employee because I am very good at my job functions and like doing the work. I think I’d be a terrible manager because I am not interested in learning to manage people and have no idea where to start to obtain that skill set even if I were interested. That said, I’ve had great managers at my company and both sides have commented on how our complementary skill sets make us great together.
There are a lot of ways to define superstar. Is it in terms of technical abilities? Being a workhorse who just knows how to manage projects and get things done? Someone who is amazing and building and maintaining relationships? Someone who wins all the industry awards? Arguably, any of these people could be superstars, but I don’t think there’s a universal definition.
At one time, I felt like a superstar. I am skilled technically, project manage like a boss, and have been well-liked. Then I became a mid-level manager, and now I feel practically invisible even though those qualities haven’t changed.
I manage someone who is a superstar in terms of technical abilities. I don’t think that would necessarily translate well to a formal leadership role. I can see her being a mentor, some day, if she wants that, but I don’t see that inclination in her yet.
My DH is a rare unicorn who has excelled at every career level. Some days, I’m a little jealous, if I’m being honest.
I am very skeptical of this whole concept. Something tells me there are a lot of “superstar employees” who, say, are White men who played lacrosse at Duke after graduating from a high school in Montgomery County, MD and coincidentally work for someone with the same background.
On a different note, I think one of the major reasons law firms are horrible places to work is because they promote based exclusively on productivity (or professed productivity) as an individual contributor and specifically do not pay one bit of attention to management training/aptitude.
i dont think this has to be true at the lower individual contributor level. i worked in a niche type of consulting after college where some of my same level colleagues understood data/statistics/econometrics and in a way that my brain just didn’t. there was a lot of technical work on various computer programs and they could just figure out ways to do it much faster than i could. thinking back demographic similarities/differences between the supervisors and the individual employees had little to no bearing on their superstar-ness yes, i sometimes had more fun talking to my colleague whose younger sister was coincidentally in my sorority (realized this after i was hired). now this doesn’t mean that they would later on continue to be good managers (or even want to be managers), but as individual contributors they were just skilled in a way i wasn’t
On the contrary, my observation is that a lot of superstars have a disadvantaged background that has held them back a little, so they’re relatively underemployed and outperform the lacrosse players around them.
Yeah, I’ve been one at every job I’ve had as an adult. Objective and subjective criteria. I’m just a really good employee: I work hard, I have excellent reading comprehension and email management skills, my teams do well, I and my teams are regularly asked to take on mission critical work, and I seem to be lucky or savvy enough where office politics rarely drag me down… I’m rarely involved, other than occasionally being asked by both or all sides to mediate. I received formal leadership and management training from a very young age because I was leading teams early. (Aka, my boss’ spouse passed unexpectedly when I was 21, boss was gone for 2 months unexpectedly, I was interim boss and during that time, got sales up, hired well, fired well; company and boss recognized this and formally put me in charge of a segment of the team when boss came back.) I am in a professional career now and am on track to be the youngest GC my firm has ever had. I have switched companies a few times and it has been hard every time, I frankly have always left for money. I don’t give ultimatums but I know my value and had confidence that my book will follow (it always did) and my results would speak for themselves. I did get some burnout in the last few years and I wish I had spent more time, earlier, intentionally letting my team take more risks without my guidance, finding good points for them to test and potentially fail. I am working thorough team development differently now – I think some of my success was due to access and some of it was my own drive, but I am trying to set up the company to run well without me just at it does with me… without making myself redundant ;) but truly, it’s a succession planning and work life balance headache I’m trying to tackle in my 40s instead of when my team has all retired before me and I’m trying to train 20 year olds when I’m 60.
By formal performance reviews and informal feedback, I might call myself a superstar. The hilarious thing is that it’s my job to shield my customers from the red tape. My job is to keep things moving, and they are ‘the talent’.