Nurturing High-Performance Teams Through the Great Resignation

Daniel Echeverri - CFO Renault Mexico

The Great Resignation that followed the COVID pandemic has been covered by the media since the beginning of 2021. In July 2022, Fortune even?published an article asserting that 40 percent of U. workers were still considering quitting their jobs1. Various reasons have been put forward to explain this phenomenon, such as hostile labor environments and employee dissatisfaction.

In these chaotic times, there are still great opportunities to nurture high performance finance teams within companies. The first step is recognizing the characteristics of high performers and how to reward them accordingly. If we extrapolate from athletes, we can build a Top 3 of habits to recognize and encourage in leading performers, even before the nurturing process.?

tTo elucidate these three habits, let’s focus on marathon world record-holder Eliud Kipchoge, and see how his routine can also teach us some valuable tips. We will see how to apply them to empower top performers at the office.?

1. Discipline?

“For Kipchoge, every day starts at 5:45 A.M., and he’s in bed by 9 P.M. each night.”2???

In the office, it is also of utmost importance to respect schedules. Working long hours trying to improve yield, can lead to a decrease of creative and productive capacity as the brain, being a muscle, also gets fatigued; even worse it can lead to overburn.?

Furthermore, Eliud has a very specific daily, weekly, and yearly schedule. This should also be the case for leading performers in the office: they should organize their days to get the most out of each hour. They should separate their time for meetings from their time for individual work according to their productivity levels during the day .This will help them increase the chances of achieving their weekly/monthly/yearly goals.?

2. Work-life balance and time off?

“After each marathon, Kipchoge takes three to four weeks completely off before beginning a three-to-four-week preparatory phase” 2

Finance teams are used to monthly and quarterly cycles that hinder outside-the-box thinking.?A longer rest is the perfect opportunity to break the cycle and brew novel transformation projects. Work-free holidays should unquestionably be perceived as part of the job, as they are the basis for the generation of new ideas that will empower employees to over perform — and also to expand their knowledge of different topics related to other aspects of life. As we all learned from the COVID pandemic, enjoying our private personal and social lives, together with a properly spent holiday season, are the minimum requirements for a balanced way of living.

3. Continuous learning?

“I document the time, the kilometers, the massage, the exercises, the shoes I’m using, the feeling about those shoes,” he says. “Everything.” 2

Being aware of the work that high performers do in a company, reveals a myriad of opportunities to be tackled.?We can use these newly discovered opportunities to empower leading performers and to allow them to improve at what they do. In finance, besides documenting the systems at every monthly closure, a great habit is to document how the process was and if any improvement can be made.?

These three?habits should always be encouraged for leading performers or even to anyone who wants to improve their performance.

Now that we have a clear picture of what the Top 3 habits are, we can present five levers that will definitely nurture top performers:

1. Having purpose?

Eliud has a clear purpose and that’s what makes him wake up every day at 5:45 and start his routine. That should also be the case for the people in the office. They should always have at least one ultimate and clear goal, which becomes a compass that points north when times are rough (which nowadays is very usual).?

2. Embracing proven methodologies

A multitude of agile tools and methodologies have been proven to work. It would simply be nonsense not to use any of them to nurture teams and achieve faster and better results.

3. Constantly embracing challenges

Finance has been historically known by the dreaded monthly closures and the excel spreadsheets for crunching numbers to meet deadlines. This is becoming, for obvious, reasons less and less attractive.?

That’s why instead of overloading teams with more number-crunching activities, new challenges should always be proposed and encouraged for leading performers. It will give them the chance to go further and to feel the rush of achieving ambitious and challenging targets.?

4. Increasing the scope?

Leading performers often have curious minds, and this can conflict with the repetitive nature of some finance-related activities. Nevertheless, finance teams have the opportunity to interact with all areas of the company. So why not encourage teams to participate and lead transversal projects to constantly learn and deliver better results?

5. Adopting the concept of “culture wins”?

As explained in the book from William Vanderbloemen, Culture Wins, the best way to nurture top performers is to create a cultural environment where they feel free to grow and be themselves while creating value for the company.

In conclusion, despite the Great Resignation, the pandemic created an uncountable number of challenges that can be tackled while encouraging performance habits and nurturing leading performers inside our companies.?