Élodie is a senior leader in a technology company. She has a young child and a husband who also works. She is particularly strong at two skill sets: leadership and collaborative problem solving. Because of this, she’s considered critical for major company initiatives.

What’s her reward for being such a high performer?

• Stressful goals: Because she’s done so well in the past, she often receives the most complex and risky goals after others have failed.
• Meeting mania: Because she is seen as an essential part of the team and can often solve even the thorniest of issues, her days are filled with back-to-back meetings, which requires her to get work done at night and on weekends.
• Under-mentored: Because her organization focuses on fixing and improving “squeaky wheels,” Élodie feels under-mentored by her leaders. Since she doesn’t cause problems, her needs are not met.
• Return-to-office pressure: Because she’s “high profile,” Élodie has a higher expectation to work from the office, resulting in less flexibility.

On top of that, leadership is becoming harder. Skill gaps, decreasing loyalty, worsening volatility, and higher worker expectations have increased the burden on leaders to the point where leaders are burning out at significantly higher levels. After battling burnout for months, Élodie quit, despite her company taking all the standard measures to retain talent. So why aren’t current attempts working?

For many reasons, and as we describe in our book Primed to Perform, many companies build cultures that are focused on controlling the output of low performers, rather than growing and unlocking everyone’s skills. For example, think about your task management meetings, where you review what tasks are red (problematic), yellow, or green. Who is this meeting for? Its purpose is typically to ensure that low performers get the bare minimum done. But is it helping low performers improve? And is it the best use of high performers’ time? In both cases, usually not.

Or consider traditional annual performance reviews, which are typically designed to strike fear in low performers rather than help high performers excel (which comes instead from continuous developmental coaching). Rigid goal setting and approval, mandatory training programs detailed procedural guidelines — none of these processes accelerate your most valuable colleagues.

This approach is low-ROI and ultimately problematic for high-performance cultures. Leaders spend an inordinate amount of time handholding their least productive colleagues and managing what they’re working on and how, instead of helping their strongest contributors move faster and do more. Meanwhile, because these handholding tactics are focused on pushing the work forward rather than figuring out how to get better, they fail to turn low performers into high performers. Ultimately, by failing to nurture skill or motivation, low performance cultures stunt growth and repel top talent.

Organizations need to build cultures that are obsessed with high performers, focusing the culture on keeping high performers and making new ones. Here’s how.

Read more here.