The Trouble with Top Performers

Workplace Leadership

If you read any popular business magazines like Harvard Business Review, or other management books and articles, you will definitely encounter some examples about various super performers (or hyper-efficient employees) that exist in various organizations and how they did something great. Of course, the definition of a super performer is a subjective term that can vary from manager to manager or from company to company and can be quite varied based on their personal experiences. And that picture can range from someone who is super-fast at everything, a noisy person, a flamboyant person, or someone who has all the answers, a management’s blue-eyed boy, a jargon emitting person, a go-to person, or even someone who always comes to office very early and leaves very late, and so on.

Or if you go by the job advertisements of organizations today, a super performer are someone who meets (or claims to meet) the fancy criteria like below (based on real sentences picked from some newspaper advertisements).

The Kind of Job Ads Today

We are looking for high-value employees dedicated to delivering innovation to assist our clients in high-performance delivery. The employee must be a class of his own and raise his or her sights above the horizon. We are looking for superefficient leaders who have the challenge to outdo themselves and be a winner all the way.

We are looking for a person to lead, motivate and create a high-performance team capable of continuous innovation and excellence in working for a global leader.

We are looking for candidates who are bubbling, energetic and invigorating to join a sales team of a global winner who can swim in an ocean of opportunities.