How to Engage Top Talent: What Keeps Star Employees Engaged

How to Engage Top Talent When It Matters Most
Keeping star performers fully engaged is harder than ever — and far more consequential than many leaders realize. How to engage top talent remains a central challenge for talent management leaders because it can either strengthen or quietly undermine your entire people strategy. When high performers disengage, performance slips, discretionary effort disappears, and retention risk spikes. If you are losing some of your best people — or sensing early signs of disengagement among those you can least afford to lose — this article on employee engagement and retention is for you.

The Cost of Losing Top Talent
It’s bad enough to lose any productive, experienced employee but when you lose your top, difficult-to-replace talent, it’s painful! Not only do other employees start to question their own loyalty, but we know form project postmortem data that the project they were working on is often at risk.

How to Engage Top Talent So Star Employees Thrive

You may believe you are already doing the right things by treating high performers differently — spotlighting their results, rewarding standout contributions, and offering visible recognition. Yet many leaders still miss a critical point. What truly keeps star employees engaged goes well beyond praise, perks, or preferential treatment.

Based on organizational culture assessment research, here is what top talent consistently needs and expects in order to remain engaged, energized, and committed to their current role:

1. Challenges and Opportunities to Grow
   Star employees are inherently ambitious. They are driven to build new skills, test their limits, and take on work that expands their impact. When growth stalls, engagement erodes — even among top performers.

   Smart organizations intentionally create multiple, meaningful ways for high performers to increase their professional value. This includes high-stakes projects that matter, stretch assignments that build new capabilities, access to respected executive mentors, participation in senior-level strategy sessions, opportunities for formal professional education, and — critically — a transparent career path that shows what comes next and how to get there.

2. Autonomy
   Top talent rarely tolerates micromanagement. High performers want the freedom to make decisions, set priorities, and manage their work without constant oversight. What they expect from leaders is not control, but clarity — clear goals and accountabilities, defined roles and responsibilities, agreed upon outcomes, and shared standards for success.

   Once expectations are established, effective leaders step back. They allow top employees to determine how best to achieve the results. Star performers have the judgment, capability, and motivation to chart their own path — and autonomy is often the difference between sustained engagement and quiet frustration.

3. Reasonable Workload
   High performers work hard and consistently deliver more in less time than the average employee. That efficiency, however, should not become an excuse to overload them. Too often, top talent is “rewarded” with more work simply because they can handle it — until they cannot.

   Before assigning additional responsibilities, check in. This is especially important for player-coaches who are expected to balance individual contribution with people leadership. Demonstrating awareness of capacity signals respect for both their well-being and their long-term effectiveness. Do not punish efficiency with endless assignments; sustainable performance depends on a workload that challenges without exhausting.

4. Strategic Direction
   Keep your top talent fully informed about corporate strategy and explicit about where they fit within it. High performers are not motivated by simply checking items off a tactical to-do list. They want to understand the big picture of why the work matters.

   Star employees think in terms of impact and trajectory. They want visibility into where their team and the organization are headed, how priorities connect, and how success is defined at the enterprise level. Engagement increases when employees have a clear line of sight between their daily efforts and the broader mission. Purpose, not just productivity, keeps top talent invested.

5. Accountability for All
   “A players” care deeply about standards. They want to know where they stand relative to others, take pride in strong results, and value recognition that clearly differentiates superior performance. When done well, visible accountability raises the bar for everyone.

   What top talent will not tolerate is a culture that looks the other way on underperformance. When below-average performance is accepted without clear expectations, a defined improvement plan, and evidence of real progress, high performers notice — and disengage. Over time, they will leave organizations that fail to hold everyone accountable to the same performance standards.

The Bottom Line
Star employees operate by a different set of expectations. Keeping them engaged requires intentional, differentiated leadership — not generic programs or one-size-fits-all policies. Take a hard look at your employee engagement and retention practices through this lens. If any of these elements are missing or inconsistently applied, move quickly. High performers will not wait long for an environment that allows them to thrive, and another organization will be ready to offer it.

Want to learn more about how to engage top talent?  Download The Only 16-Step Employee Retention Strategy for Top Talent You Need

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.