Early in one of my roles, I inherited a solidly average team: mid-level people, mid-level output, nothing on any metric that would make you look twice. And sitting inside that average team was a guy who, once I actually paid attention, was a head above everyone around him. Not because his numbers were better. On paper, his numbers looked like everyone else’s. What I saw was something the numbers didn’t show: He was hungry for something harder, and he was bored out of his mind.
So, I went to my boss and asked him to build a new team around innovation, with him on it. The two of us, just starting out, ended up delivering more than a department of 20 people down the hall who had, more or less, come in to sit. Same company, same pay bands, same performance system rating all of us. The system saw a mid-level contributor on a mid-level team. It had no way to see the person who would outproduce 20 others the moment someone gave him a reason to.
That gap is the thing our retention systems can’t see, and it’s costing companies their best people.
See also: AI promised to reduce the load. What happened?
Standard performance measurement misses key performers at times
Here’s the first half of the problem. Standard performance measurement grades everyone on the same scale, and that scale captures current output. But current output tells you almost nothing about a person’s real value, because it doesn’t capture the distance between what someone is giving and what they could give. Two people can post identical numbers this quarter. One is at their ceiling. The other is at 10%, quietly disengaged, half-looking for the door, and would deliver 10 times more if they actually wanted to be there. The system rates them the same. It measures the output and stays blind to the potential, which is the number that actually matters for retention.
The second half is even less visible. Almost no one is measuring why a person is there at all. Plenty of people show up to put in the hours and collect the paycheck, and a performance system built around activity will happily rate them as fine. They fill the timesheet, they attend the meetings and the metrics look healthy. But a company should be giving a person something real: a goal, a direction, a reason to want to achieve, and the person should want to achieve it. When that’s missing, no amount of measured activity turns into value. Those 20 people down the hall passed every metric. They just weren’t trying to build anything.
And this is where it stops being a manager’s job and becomes an HR problem—specifically a senior HR problem. A direct manager, on their own, usually can’t see this clearly. They’re too close, too caught up in the work and often too invested in the story that their team is doing well. Seeing whether a person is truly engaged, whether their potential is being wasted, whether they’re growing or just sitting, takes someone who understands people, who sits a little outside the immediate reporting line and who can say the uncomfortable thing plainly. That’s HR. Not HR as a compliance function, but HR as the part of the organization that actually reads people, which is the version of the role that earns a seat at the table.
I’d add one honest caution, because it would be naive to skip it: AI is going to change this in both directions. Used well, it can help HR see people more clearly, spot disengagement earlier and personalize how you develop and retain someone instead of managing everyone to the same average. That’s the upside, and it’s real. But the same tools will also make it far easier for people to manufacture the appearance of work, to generate the artifacts of productivity, to look engaged and high-performing while doing very little. AI cuts both ways. It gives HR a sharper lens, and it gives disengaged employees a better disguise, and a CHRO who only plans for the upside is going to get blindsided by the downside.
Measurement against the average employee does some a disservice
So, the practical shift is this. Stop measuring everyone against the same picture of the average employee, because that picture hides both your most wasted talent and your most convincing coasters. Start asking the two questions the standard system can’t answer: “How big is the gap between what this person delivers and what they could deliver?” and “Do they actually have a reason to be here?” Those aren’t survey questions with clean answers. They take a human read, done by someone independent enough to be honest about it. But that read is where retention actually lives.
When you get it right, it’s genuinely win-win. The person gets what they were missing: a real challenge and room to grow, and they stop looking for the exit. The company gets someone doing their best work instead of running out the clock. I’ve seen what one hungry, well-placed person can do against a room full of people who came in to sit. The difference wasn’t talent the system could measure. It was whether anyone bothered to look past the average and see them.
