The Star Factor: Discover What Your Top Performers Do Differently

That's exactly what "The Star Factor" helps you do. In this book, you learn how to identify the best performers in your organization, how to organize a workshop to learn what these people do that makes them great, and how to convert this knowledge into a learning program so that everyone else in your organization can benefit and grow.

What sets "The Star Factor" apart is its "affirmative leadership" approach, based on the latest research in neuroscience, motivation, learning, and achievement. The authors have used this approach successfully in hundreds of organizations.

The book is also unusual, because the whole premise is to create a learning program for your entire organization. The goal here is to replicate what your best people are doing on a large scale.

According to the authors, their approach consistently achieves an average return of 20 times the investment. They say an $800,000,000-a-year advertising company doubled its sales. A manufacturing firm doubled the accuracy of its inventory management forecasting. So it might sound like a lot of work at first, but in the end it's going to pay off in a big way. "The Star Factor" is written for executives, managers, trainers, and coaches who want to get the best out of everyone they work with.

Dr William Seidman is a recognized expert on executive decision and performance improvement. He's the co-founder and CEO of Cerebyte, a performance improvement company. Richard Grbavac is an executive at Cerebyte, and has 27 years of experience in sales, organizational development, and consulting.

So, keep listening to find out why using your stars to lead organizational change is such a good idea, three questions that will help identify the stars in your team, and how to turn your stars' wisdom into a learning program for your organization.

"The Star Factor" is divided into 12 chapters, and comes in at 240 pages. It's clear from the start what the authors mean by the label "star." Your stars are the people who work with a driving sense of purpose and engagement. They love what they do, and they have a passionate commitment to their work. They're willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish their goals, even it means going outside normal routines and processes.

This mind-set drives results that go above and beyond what other people achieve. We need to point out that your stars aren't necessarily more talented or skilled than other people in your organization. It's their attitude and commitment that sets them apart. Top performers usually get that way because they can see the purpose and good in their work. They believe in what they're doing, and so they care deeply about achieving their goals.

If your organization is undergoing large-scale change, it's a smart move to ask your stars to lead, for several reasons. First, they're already embedded in your corporate culture. They live the values in your organization, and they're good role models for others. Your stars are also readily available, less expensive than consultants, and they're already respected by your team.

This respect and admiration is really important because it increases the chance that everyone will embrace the change.

We liked that the authors included this tip early on in the book, because it gives managers and leaders another good reason for identifying the stars in the organization. These top performers can be great role models for other people, especially promising new recruits.

As you go through the book, you may think of others ways you could use your stars to help everyone on your team learn and grow. They would make great coaches and mentors, or you could pair them with average or poor performers.

Keep in mind that some of your stars won't want to be recognized or put in the spotlight. Some people are happy to stay in the shadows and do the work they love every day – and that's fine. Others might not want to be singled out or seen as a "favorite," since this might affect their relationships with colleagues.

You might want to adjust your approach with these people, to make sure you're not making them feel uncomfortable.

So how do you find the stars in your organization? The authors have three questions you can use to identify your top performers.

Question one. Who are the people you most respect for their ability to perform some or all of the functions associated with a particular initiative, program, or project?

Question two. Are these the people you would go to if you needed to solve a critical problem or identify leadership for a new initiative, program, or project?

Question three. If these people told you how to do something would you a) believe them, and b) do whatever they said to do, without question?

These three questions might seem like an overly simplistic way to find the top performers in your organization. But the authors assure us repeatedly that this questioning process works. They even tested their approach against a more analytical process, in the same companies. The analytical approach took months, and cost thousands of dollars, and it yielded the same results as these three questions.

Once you’ve identified your stars, your next step is to figure out what makes them perform so well. This can be tricky because, chances are, your stars don't really know what makes them so great. Their attitudes and behaviors come so naturally to them, or are so second nature, that they don't think about them. Some of them might not even realize they're stars at all.

The authors outline a process they call "Wisdom Discovery." This involves holding a workshop-style session with your star performers, to uncover four important elements within them. These sessions will be most valuable if you have an objective facilitator organizing the discussion.

The first element you need to identify in Wisdom Discovery is a clear statement of the person’s true purpose at work.

The second element is their big-picture view of the steps or phases necessary to achieve their purpose.

The third element is a deeper definition of what greatness looks like in each of the steps they just defined.

The last element is a list of the activities that build the habits necessary to achieve greatness in their role.

The authors stress that you need to take care when choosing the person who will tease out these elements. Whether it's you or someone else, the person needs to have a genuinely inquisitive nature. They need to ask questions with a spirit of humility and curiosity, and they need to be a good listener.

The Wisdom Discovery Process takes time and patience, and the authors go into a lot of detail about how you should approach each element. We appreciated that they took their time explaining this, because without their detailed instructions, the process could easily feel overwhelming.

The authors also include several case studies that show what the Wisdom Discovery Process looks like in real organizations, with real people. These examples serve as guides for the type of questions and answers you might get in your own process.

Once you've figured out why your stars are so great at what they do, you have to find a way to translate this wisdom into a learning program for the rest of your organization. To do this, you need to convert their raw experiences into effective learning tasks.

Neuroscience shows that the most effective way to learn, and retain what you've learned, is short, frequent bursts of mental and physical repetition of a key attitude, concept, or behavior. You need six to eight repetitions of the same idea, over a short period of time, to create new neural circuits and new habits.

These repetitions don't have to be done the exact same way. Research shows that people learn best when the activities change. So, for example, you could read an article about a key concept, write something about that concept, talk about the concept with others, and apply that concept to hands-on activities.

To create a learning plan for your organization, write down the attitudes and behaviors you want other people to learn. Next, design eight to ten mental and physical activities that teach or reinforce these desired behaviors. These activities need to be short, stimulating, and focused.

Here's an example of what this looks like.

One clothing store used the Wisdom Discovery Process with their star performers. One of the stars said this about their role: "I work diligently to create an energetic, customer-obsessed team that excites each customer, resulting in increased sales and profit. Our team makes this store the preferred place to shop and work in our community."

There are several ways you could turn this star's statement into a learning experience for the rest of the team. First, you could assign team members to shadow her, so they'd learn what a top-performing manager looks like. Ask them to write down how their own store could make a difference in their community.

Next, ask them to think about what customer obsession means, and how they could build it into their team. Last, meet with your staff weekly to talk about new ideas and ways to engage customers.

The authors say that once you've identified the learning tasks for your team, go slowly. If you try to work on too many tasks at once, your team's going to get overwhelmed and lose interest. If you go too slowly, you won't have the steady repetition you need to reinforce the learning.

The best pace is two learning tasks per week. Again, you should have eight to ten learning tasks for each principle that your stars identify.

Once you get your learning tasks in place, it's time to think about how you're going to motivate everyone else to take part in the learning process.

A lot of people will get motivated once they find out that what they're learning came from a respected colleague in the organization. But this is only part of the process. You're going to have to work to get some people motivated. And, the authors spend several chapters going over some useful motivational strategies.

They say that one of the best ways to motivate people to adopt these new behaviors is to present that change in ways that increase listeners' dignity and honor. They call this approach Fair Process.

The Fair Process approach gathers input and makes decision-making visible. For example, a leadership team might start this process by meeting with small groups of managers and team members. They would explain the conditions in the marketplace, and ask for suggestions to improve them. The leadership team would make it clear that their suggestions will be compared with the suggestions from other groups, and that all of them will be seriously considered.

Next, they'd compile the suggestions and present them to all the employees, along with a plan based on the best suggestions. The employees would then set up teams to plan and implement those suggestions.

Now, this is a fairly simplistic example, and we know it makes it sound like change is really easy. But you can see how a process based on transparency and communication could work well. Fair Process is not a technique, exactly. It's more a way of being – a cultural value that focuses on participation and communication.

Another way you can get people motivated to emulate the stars in your organization is to change how they see their role. Remember, most stars understand the deeper purpose behind their work. They find meaning and joy in what they do, no matter what that is, because they truly believe they're helping other people in a positive way.

For example, one pharmacy company asked its managers to describe what they did. Most managers said their job was to sell 120 prescriptions a day. This company goal had become the purpose of their work.

But the stars in the organization didn't mention a thing about prescriptions. They said that they were critical parts of a family's emergency response system. The stars could see that their role wasn't managing a pharmacy, but helping families.

Steer your team to understand the deeper purpose in what they do. Explain how learning the skills and attitudes of the stars in your organization will help them do their jobs better. Chances are, your team will find more meaning, joy, and purpose in their work along the way.

So, what's our last word on "The Star Factor"?

We really liked this book, for several reasons.

First, every organization has a small handful of people who stand out from their peers. And all of us can imagine what might happen if everyone in an organization could produce the same results.

This book teaches managers, leaders, and coaches how to identify what it is that makes an organization's greatest people so great. And, it gives you an actionable, step-by-step approach to transfer those attitudes and behaviors to everyone on your team.

We should point out that the Affirmative Leadership approach does take time. It's not something you can read about and implement in a week or less. But if you give this process the time and space it deserves, you might see a big difference in your team's engagement, morale, productivity, and results.

The authors' approach is sound and practical. It's not the most exciting book we've ever read, but it's definitely useful.

Our only criticism has to do with how the authors use their research. While they do a good job mentioning research relevant to the processes and learning approaches in the book, they only quote specific papers a couple of times. We feel that consistently sourcing this material would make their approach, and the book in general, more credible.

"The Star Factor," by William Seidman and Richard Grbavac, is published by Amacom Books.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.