How to Get the Most Out of Your High-Potential Leaders

Motivation plays a big role in the staying power of employees. To increase the retention of your workforce, first take the time to understand their “total motivation,” a phrase coined by Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor in their book Primed to Perform (Harper Business, 2015).  

Ask yourself: How can I address the human, and not the employee? 

“That’s big, because if you’re trying to get the most productivity out of that employee, if you keep calling them ‘employee’ and you don’t think of them as a human being, you’ve missed the mark,” said Noble Potts, talent transformation expert at background screening firm Checkr, during a session at SHRM Talent 2025 in Nashville. “That’s important as it relates to figuring out how to better engage and get that best employee experience out of that individual.”

An employee’s total motivation comprises:  

• Indirect motivators, which are short-term factors that aren’t related to an employee’s identity. Examples include economic pressure or emotional pressure. These are short-term motivators.

• Direct motivators, which tie an employee’s work to their identity. Examples include an employee’s sense of play (curiosity and innovation at work), purpose (their alignment with job responsibilities and business objectives), and potential (their willingness to pursue development opportunities).   

“If you’re able to focus more on [direct motivators], you’ll get that higher employee performance and that longer-lasting person without reliance on just the compensation,” said co-presenter Jared Snyder, director of talent management at The Shield Companies, a pest control services provider.

Once you understand your employee motivators, Snyder suggests these techniques to elevate your high-potential leaders:

• Talk to your employees to identify and establish employee benefits that maximize their particular work/life balance needs.
• Understand your employees’ baseline — learn their growth areas and where they’re starting from.
• Teach your employees the art of “spontaneous communication” so they feel comfortable being pulled into meetings with senior leaders. 
• Let your employees fix their problems themselves and become the problem-solvers you need to lead your company.
• Coach your employees on how to communicate and understand the “why” of every project they work on so they can achieve buy-in.
• Recognize that employees’ brains work differently than yours. If you lead an organization that has the flexibility, consider adapting your remote work policy to suit the individual needs of your employees.

During the Q&A portion of the session, Potts addressed a participant’s question on how to plan today for the right technology and data for your organization’s future growth.

When it comes to deciding which technology to invest in, the key is selecting something with the long-term in mind, Potts said. Create project milestones along the way to assess whether things are working and make adjustments when needed.

“Do not sacrifice tomorrow for the success of today. Really look at, I can get an easy win with something, but two years down the road this is going to break,” he said. “Keep it simple, scalable, and sustainable. If your process is not built to be able to be flexible, it will break multiple times before you get to the right one, and it will not be scalable.”

For leaders to reach their full potential, they need to be able to adapt to the situation and be flexible as projects evolve. 

Encourage your team to ask the question: What is our initial state and what’s our future goal? Design flexibility into every step of the project process, including the communication plan.