The 2% Rule Nobody Talks About
You know those company-wide emails celebrating “everyone’s contributions”? I send them too. But have you ever thought about the reality in that moment. One were about 2% of the people in the company are the people who actually move the needle.
The rest? They are what keeps the business running. Doing their jobs. Checking boxes. And it’s an essential function that’s needed in every business. We need people to check boxes. But they’re not the ones driving business impact.
This isn’t about being cynical. It’s about being honest so we can actually do something useful with this reality.
They’re not always the obvious ones. Not always the loudest in meetings or the ones with “Senior” in their title.
They’re the junior employees who “get it” from Day 1. They raise their hand to help and create great work that outperforms the senior team members. It could also be the IT person in a business that knows people in the industry and helps drive business growth by introducing new talent.
These aren’t just made up examples. These are real life things that I’ve seen firsthand.
You know them when you see them. They’re the ones who make things happen without being asked. Who see problems before they become fires. Who quietly influence how work actually gets done around the company.
And here’s what most organizations do with these people. We treat them exactly the same as everyone else.
Same performance review process. Same development opportunities. Same “thank you for your hard work” messages. Same timeline for promotions. Same access to resources.
We do this because it feels fair. Because we’re supposed to be equitable. Because singling people out feels uncomfortable. Because we don’t want to have to explain to the other 98% why someone’s getting something they’re not.
But equal treatment isn’t the same as impact-driven strategy. And pretending it is, costs us the people who actually matter.
Across my career, I’ve worked for places that never seem to have the budget to invest in these high performers. We never send them to conferences where cutting edge work is being shared. We never get them coaching to develop their skills more directly. We never give them the subscription to the industry news site that’s insanely expensive. We never do these things because we don’t want to do something for one person.
We don’t want to justify the treatment to the other people in the business.
And I get it. That conversation is uncomfortable. Someone’s going to ask why they didn’t get sent to the conference. Why they didn’t get the coach. Why the investment went to someone else.
But here’s what happens when we avoid that discomfort. The high performer leaves. They go somewhere that is willing to support their growth. Somewhere that sees what they’re capable of and invests accordingly.
And then we’re stuck explaining why they left. Which is a much harder conversation than explaining why we invested in them differently.
I’ve watched this happen more times than I can count. The person who could have transformed how we work. Who had ideas that would have set us apart from the competition. Who was three steps ahead of everyone else. They leave because we were too worried about being fair to everyone to be strategic about anyone.
They go somewhere else and do exactly what we hoped they’d do here. Just not for us.
From my perspective, this is where HR fails most. We know who the high performers are. We see it every day. But we don’t act on it because we’re trapped in systems designed to treat everyone equally.
If 2% of people drive 98% of the impact, our job isn’t to make everyone feel equally special. It’s to keep the 2% engaged and here. When one of them leaves, you don’t lose one person. You lose a chunk of what makes things work. You lose the person who was solving problems before they landed on your desk. The person who was making everyone around them better. The person who was creating the momentum that moved everything forward.
It’s to know who they actually are. And this is harder than it sounds. It’s not always who you think. Sometimes it’s the person three levels down who everyone goes to when they need something done right. The person who doesn’t self-promote but quietly keeps everything running. The person leadership hasn’t noticed yet but will notice the second they’re gone.
It’s to stop spreading resources evenly like peanut butter. Not everyone needs the same level of investment. Your top performer needs different development than someone who’s coasting. They need bigger challenges, more autonomy, access to people and opportunities that stretch them. Giving everyone the same thing isn’t fair. It’s wasteful.
And it’s to make it possible for more people to become part of the 2%. Some people have the potential but not the environment or support. They could be high performers if someone invested in them differently. If someone saw what they could become instead of just what they are right now.
But doing any of this means making choices. Prioritizing. Saying no to things that feel nice but don’t move anything forward.
It means your top performer gets more of your time than someone who’s just coasting. It means the project that matters gets the right people, even if it’s “unfair” to other teams. It means being willing to have uncomfortable conversations about why resources aren’t distributed equally.
I’m not here to tell you this is easy or that it won’t create tension. It will. People will notice. People will ask questions. People will feel like there are favorites.
And you know what? They’re right. There are. Because not everyone contributes equally, and pretending they do doesn’t make it true. It just means you’re not being strategic about where you focus.
Picture this. You’re in a budget meeting and someone asks why you’re sending one person to an expensive conference when you could send three people to a cheaper one. Or why you’re investing in a coach for one employee when that money could fund training for the whole team.
This is the moment most HR leaders cave. We justify the equal distribution. We talk about fairness and equity and making sure everyone has opportunities.
But the real answer is harder to say out loud. Because that one person will create more value than the three combined. Because that coach will help them become the leader we desperately need them to be. Because investing equally in unequal performers is how you lose your best people.
It’s hard to learn how to identify the 2% before they prove themselves. How to spot the potential before it’s obvious. How to know who’s going to be a high performer before they’ve had the chance to show it.
It’s hard to learn how to support them without burning them out or making them feel like they’re carrying everyone else. Because that’s a real risk. You lean on your best people because they deliver. And sometimes you lean too hard and they break.
It’s hard to learn how to be honest about this reality without demoralizing the 98% of the workforce. Because most people aren’t in the 2%, and that’s okay. But how do you communicate that without making them feel like they don’t matter?
One thing that I think is key for HR professionals, and something I am trying to do, is getting to know everyone that comes into the business. HR professionals can be some of the best judges of a person, because we have to be, and that’s where our deep skills are. The more we know about our people, who they are, what they strive to be, the better we can see the patterns that are there.
And I promise you they are there. The junior employee who asks better questions than people twice their level. The individual contributor who influences decisions without any formal authority. The person who makes their manager better just by being on the team.
But humans are a tough nut to crack. And spotting these patterns takes time and attention that most HR teams don’t have because we’re too busy treating everyone the same.
I don’t have perfect answers. I’m not claiming I’ve figured this out. But I know this. If we keep treating retention, development, and resources as one-size-fits-all, we’re going to keep losing the people who actually matter.
We’ll keep having exit interviews where we pretend to be surprised that someone’s leaving. We’ll keep asking “what could we have done differently” when the answer was right in front of us the whole time. We’ll keep replacing high performers with average performers and wondering why things don’t work as well as they used to.
What does the 2% look like in your organization? And more importantly, what are you actually doing to keep them?