When Capt. Paul Carelli was in the Navy, he would step into a new leadership position every two to three years. During each transition, it was standard practice to get a “pass down,” the former leader’s take on the team’s strengths and weaknesses. “I refused the pass down,” Carelli said. “I would never take anybody's pass down on who was who and what they could do. Because what you would find out is that those people may have been put into a position that they weren't suited for. I didn't want to know about the people from the perspective of the previous leadership. So everybody started off with a clean slate. That was my first step into arranging a high-performance team.” New eyes, a fresh take.

Carelli, who is currently the director of North American flight operations at Kodiak Aircraft Co., which makes short-takeoff-and-landing aircraft, shared his philosophy for building elite teams during a recent From Day One webinar titled “The Need to Exceed: Harnessing Motivation Within Ultra-high-performance Teams.” The webinar featured a panel of five leaders across multiple industries discussing how motivational needs differ when it comes to ultra-high-performance teams, and what tools and techniques leaders can use to drive their elite charges to bold new heights.

Panel moderator Lydia Dishman, a staff editor at Fast Company, opened the conversation by asking panelists to define ultra-high performers in three words. Mathian Osiski, senior director of talent management at Becton, Dickinson and Co., an early manufacturer of syringes that today produces some of the most sophisticated medical technology in the world, said she sees ultra-high performers as those who “consistently exceed expectations.”

“Results, consistency, alignment,” is what Casey Wahl sees in ultra-high-performers. Wahl is the CEO of Attuned, a company that studies intrinsic motivation in the workplace.

Why is it relevant to explore the motivations of such high performers? “Organizations and teams have had to pivot from their traditional ways of working into a more creative, and sometimes radically different, way of working. Individuals who are agile and made that shift are the ones who not only survived, but they also thrived,” said Janet Ghosh, global director of HR at Stanley Black & Decker. The industrial tools manufacturer has been rapidly digitizing its products and piloting new means of using AI to improve tool integration into customers’ operations.

“So, what are some of the common traits these individuals have?” Ghosh said. “What we have experienced in our organization is they have the courage to innovate and do things differently. They are agile in the way they think, they’re inclusive, and they collaborate well, both internally and externally. They're highly resilient, and they are problem solvers.”

Panelists said that being an ultra-high performer is about more than consistently hitting key performance indicators (KPIs) or adapting quickly. Some of the speakers called the necessary element authenticity, others emotional intelligence or social intelligence, but all agreed that there is a qualitative, deeply human element common among ultra-high performers.

Osiski offered this observation about how leaders with such traits helped their employees thrive during the pandemic: “A lot of the folks that float to the top, they're not always the nicest folks. They’re tough and they get there through grit, and sometimes there's a little bit of a trail of destruction,” she said. “Whereas the ones that floated up to the top during Covid were the ones that were actually kind and nice and did it in a way that was not rude, and helped their colleagues along. They're the ones that got discretionary effort as leaders, they're the ones that were able to break boundaries and speed up when necessary.”

Spotting the Ones With Potential

So, how do employers evaluate ultra-high-performance potential? It can be easy to spot metric-based potential by looking at past performance, but panelists emphasized focusing on that authentic, emotionally intelligent quality when vetting candidates both internally and externally. Wahl said a simple addition to their job descriptions–“we want people with a kind heart”–elicited an emotional reaction from applicants and helped them winnow their candidate pool.

Wahl said his customers use Attuned’s intrinsic-motivation assessment, which looks at a person’s value hierarchy, to get a sense of an employee’s EQ, or emotional quotient, and how their values align with team and company goals.

In a workplace culture that puts so much value on metric-based performance, EQ can get ignored, the result being teams that start to look like a homogenous bunch of ladder-climbers. But emotional intelligence is what can turn a strong performer into a high-performer into an ultra-high performer–and elevate others with them.

Speakers on the panel cautioned against trying to replicate the success of one high performer by scouting or hiring a duplicate. “Ultra-high performance does not equate with groupthink,” Dishman pointed out. Nick Allen, a regional talent-development leader for the global design and architecture firm Gensler, said many leaders have a go-to manager they ask to head-up critical teams and projects, but that this is a poor way to maintain strong results because exceptional performance depends on heterogeneous teams and leadership. Each team should be composed with fresh eyes, he said.

The Team Benefits of Diversity

Wahl said diversity is a must if employers are going to build a team that consistently exceeds expectations. “We need it from an ethical and a moral point of view, but also a strategic [point of view] to create innovative products for different markets.” While diversity of experience and thought is necessary, everyone must be united around a common goal, a common value, Wahl explained. “I don't have it from a scientific point of view, but I have it from a lot of data. Teams that are generally aligned by their values are more high-performing,” he said. Denying the importance of diversity is likely why many companies can identify high-performers here and there, but fail to cultivate teams that operate at the ultra-high level.

In order to innovate, and therefore take risks, employees must feel that their environment is safe for risk-taking, whether or not they fall into the ultra-high-performing niche. “You can tell employees to be courageous, you tell employees to really speak up, that we want to hear diversity of thought, but if they don't have that sense of psychological safety, they're not going to,” Allen said.

Psychological safety is motivating for these high-potential outliers. It’s also what you’ll need to create if you want undiscovered outliers to rise up. “You need, as a leader, to foster the culture that allows people to be courageous,” said Carelli. “Because I can tell you, you can be iron-fisted, you can have a great vision, but if you don't foster that culture throughout the whole organization, nobody's going to be courageous in that organization.”

When he served as Naval commanding officer, Carelli said he made a point to acknowledge mistakes. “When we were doing combat operations and I screwed up as the commanding officer of the squadron, I would stand up first and say, ‘Here's what I screwed up this week.’ And I would go into detail.” He said this was how he fostered an environment where it was safe to ask questions, safe to be courageous.

Carelli also said motivation depends on feeling a sense of ownership. “If people don't feel like they have ownership in the process, then there's not going to be a motivation for it. People don't feel valued if they're not given a task, and I can't emphasize that enough. If people aren't valued, there's no way they're going to be courageous. Ownership, I think, is fundamental to getting people to be motivated. You have a goal, inspire them with that goal, give them a vision, give them ownership, and then let them go.”

The Challenge of Sustaining at a High Level

Top-performing employees are especially prone to burnout. Employers have to be aware of this to keep these workers delivering at peak level. Wahl said this is a fact many are aware of, but few address. “The prevailing school of thought is, ‘Push people and create pressure to get results, and if they don’t like it, then this is not the right job for them,’” Dishman observed. But the panelists proposed a new way of taking care of workers.

The speakers encouraged careful distribution of work and constant evaluation of duties, a good practice for any company wanting to prevent burnout across skill levels. Allen said his organization rotates talent through their most challenging projects. “We're thinking about other talent that might be sitting on the side that has that potential, that interest or that passion to come in,” he said. “Because for every team member that's feeling burnt out, there's another team member that's feeling forgotten.”

Wahl reminded employers to be conscious of such structural stressors as international time zones. High-performers will often eat into their free time and weekends to make the meeting or accommodate the schedule. Ghosh said she’s making sure Stanley Black & Decker employees have ample mental-health benefits and employee-assistance programs. She also noted the importance of ongoing performance management: Do you have mentors for these workers? Are you creating clear career paths for them? Is there coaching available? In other words, if you want to maintain ultra-high performers, you must not only motivate, but sustain.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in Richmond, Va.