What LeBron Is Teaching Us All About Retaining Top Performers
They ask for five minutes. You already know before they say it.
That’s exactly what happened to the Lakers this year. LeBron James, paid like a franchise legend, a title on that team’s résumé, real influence over how the organization was run, told them he’s leaving anyway, at forty-one, for a twenty-fourth season somewhere else.
If an organization with that much going for it can’t guarantee someone stays, what is a small business actually supposed to do?
The Question Every SMB Owner Eventually Asks
Every SMB owner I work with runs into some version of this wall eventually. Their best person is asking for more money, or worse, they’ve already got a call from a national company, sometimes an international one, with a compensation band the SMB simply cannot touch. Most retention advice doesn’t really answer what to do about that. It tells you to build a better culture, communicate more, show more recognition, all of which genuinely matters, and none of which changes the fact that a company with a hundred times your revenue can simply offer more money than you can.
Where “Hire Only the Best” Actually Comes From
Before we get to what you can do about someone leaving, it’s worth naming where the pressure to prevent it in the first place comes from, because it’s real advice, not something HR consultants made up to sound smart. Jim Collins’ Good to Great calls it getting the right people on the bus before you even decide where the bus is going. Bradford Smart’s Topgrading method tells companies to only hire A players, defined as the top 10 percent of available talent at any salary level, and clear out everyone else. Steve Jobs put it more bluntly in his own biography: A players hire A players, B players hire C players, and tolerate a few B players and they’ll drag the whole team down with them.
It’s good advice for a company that can already compete for A players. It says nothing about what to do when you can’t afford to be in that conversation at all, which is exactly where I found myself.
What Actually Worked
I ran into this constantly as a leader inside other SMBs, long before I started my own. Every business I worked with wanted senior-calibre sales and HR leadership, and none of them could actually afford a full-time person at that level. It drove me crazy. That’s where I first learned about fractional leadership and sales rep firms, models built around the same basic idea: a business gets access to a shared, part-time senior resource instead of one it has to carry alone.
Working with those firms genuinely improved my team’s performance. It also showed me the real limits of the model as it existed, arrangements built around moving product, not around building the leadership and HR foundation underneath the team doing the selling. Fixing that gap is the actual reason I started Wesley Capital: a fractional VP of Sales and HR practice. We place experienced, senior-level talent inside SMBs that share the resource, sized to what the business genuinely needs, one or three days a week for most clients, sometimes five days a week for a short, intensive stretch.
Then, building Wesley Capital itself, I ran into the same wall again, from the other side. I tried to follow the “hire only the best” advice literally for my own team. I ran the numbers on what an actual A player, the kind Topgrading describes, would cost for the role I needed, and the number would have eaten a serious chunk of what my business brought in some months. I’d failed the first rule before I’d hired anyone at all.
What actually worked, again, was changing the structure of the problem instead of trying to out-muscle it. It’s the same principle the smartest small-market sports franchises run on. The Spurs never outspent the Lakers for talent, they developed Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili instead of buying someone else’s finished product. Most SMBs are a small-market team whether they’ve noticed it or not.
What You Can Actually Do When a Bigger Company Comes Calling
You cannot win a straight bidding war against a company with dramatically deeper pockets, and pretending you can is how a lot of SMB owners burn cash matching an offer for six months before losing the person anyway. What you can do is compete on the dimensions the research says actually decide most retention outcomes once pay stops being an obvious embarrassment.
Job embeddedness theory calls these links, fit, and sacrifice, the relationships, the sense of belonging, and what someone would genuinely give up by leaving (Mitchell et al., 2001). A large national or international employer is often worse at this than you are, not better. Bigger organizations mean less access to real decision-makers, less autonomy, a much smaller sense of individual impact, exactly the things self-determination theory identifies as core psychological needs: autonomy, mastery, and connection (Deci & Ryan). Gallup’s research backs this up in practice: 42 percent of people who voluntarily left a job said their manager or organization could have prevented it, and 70 percent of what would have kept them had nothing to do with pay (Gallup). SHRM’s 2026 data shows only 15 percent of employees in a genuinely good culture are actively job hunting, against 57 percent in a poor one (SHRM, 2026).
That Gallup number is true and easy to misread, though, because it describes the average departure, not your best person’s. A classic meta-analysis by Hunter, Schmidt, and Judiesch (1990) found that the gap between top and average performers grows sharply with job complexity: in unskilled roles, the top 1 percent produce roughly three times what the bottom 1 percent does, but in professional and managerial roles, that gap is far wider. A genuinely great salesperson or account lead isn’t marginally better than an average one, they’re often producing multiples of the value, and they generally know it. Compensation research backs up what that means for retention specifically: pay transparency creates both an incentive effect and a sorting effect, where top performers are the ones most directly attracted and retained by fair pay, and most directly pushed toward the door by underpaying them (Fulmer, Personnel Psychology, 2023). For your actual top performer, pay isn’t the footnote the average retention stat makes it look like. It’s often the thing that got the conversation with a bigger company started in the first place.
So the honest answer to “what can I do” comes down to a few things working together, not any single lever:
Cultivate the embeddedness trio. Don’t just build culture in the abstract, build the specific links (real peer relationships), fit (genuine alignment with the role), and sacrifice (clear, tangible costs to leaving) that job embeddedness theory identifies as the actual mechanics of retention.
Practice proactive compensation discipline. Staring blindly at market averages won’t cut it. Map out local benchmarks, and get creative with structure when you can’t match a raw salary number dollar for dollar, bonuses, phantom equity, vesting, hyper-flexible schedules.
Address the mastery gap before it opens. High performers leave when they get bored, per the research above. Map out their next real intellectual challenge before they start looking for it somewhere else.
Listen on an ongoing basis, not just once someone is already halfway out the door.
When someone does tell you they’re leaving, make sure they know exactly what they’d be walking away from.
Be careful with the obvious move, though. Simply offering more money to keep someone can backfire badly if you haven’t actually fixed whatever is driving them out the door outside of pay. A bigger number produced on the spot rarely survives contact with the same unaddressed manager, the same missing growth path, or whatever it was that got them answering recruiter calls in the first place, which is exactly why a lot of counteroffers fail even when they’re accepted (Momentum Search Partners, 2024). Accept, too, that sometimes it still won’t be enough. That isn’t a failure on your part. It’s the honest limit of what any SMB can do against a specific opportunity somewhere else.
By the time someone asks for five minutes to tell you they’re leaving, the decision is almost always already made. That’s usually a signal you weren’t listening, or weren’t investing enough, early enough, not a sudden event. It’s also exactly why the counteroffer conversation above so rarely works: you’re trying to solve a problem the person already solved for themselves weeks earlier.
The real lever is catching the signal earlier than that. AI-powered engagement and flight-risk platforms, Perceptyx and Gloat among them, along with predictive modules increasingly built into larger HCM systems, track disengagement signals, participation drops, and changes in communication patterns well before someone starts taking recruiter calls. Vendors in this space report flight-risk prediction accuracy in the 85 to 95 percent range (hireborderless.com, 2026; inop.ai, 2026), and it’s worth treating those numbers with some professional scepticism, they’re self-reported by companies selling the software. Even taken at face value, the honest way to think about them is this: vendor algorithms may give you a real edge over pure guesswork, but they’re data mirrors, they highlight the smoke. A human manager still has to go find and put out the fire. None of it replaces an actual manager having actual conversations. It just means you don’t have to rely on your own attention catching every warning sign in a growing SMB.
What You Actually Say in That Meeting
When someone tells you they’re leaving, the instinct is to counter with a number. Don’t lead there. The reason job embeddedness theory names links, fit, and sacrifice as separate things is that most of what actually keeps someone isn’t abstract, it’s specific: the colleague they trust, the client relationship they built from nothing, the flexibility they’ve never had to ask for twice, the equity or bonus structure that hasn’t vested yet (Mitchell et al., 2001). That conversation is the moment to name those things plainly, not to guilt anyone, but because most people making a big decision haven’t actually laid out the full cost of what they’re walking away from, and you’re often the only person in the room who can see it clearly.
That’s influence used honestly, not manipulation: helping someone see a decision whole instead of through the narrow lens of one new offer. Ask what they’d genuinely miss. Ask what they’re actually solving for. Sometimes that surfaces something fixable, a mastery gap, a recognition gap, a real pay gap, that you can address on the spot. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Why Development and a Deep Bench Matter More Than Any Single Conversation
Everything above is about the moment someone is already halfway out the door. The more durable answer is what you do long before that moment ever arrives: real training and development, and a long-term, strategic recruiting pipeline for the next top performer in your industry, not a reactive scramble once someone’s chair is already empty.
Development matters because it directly answers the mastery gap self-determination theory identifies, the same gap behind the boredom-and-stagnation departures the research keeps surfacing (Forbes Coaches Council, 2025). Strategic recruiting matters because your best people are, by definition, the hardest to replace quickly, the productivity gap between a top performer and an average one only grows with how complex the role is (Hunter, Schmidt, and Judiesch, 1990). Waiting until a departure to start looking for the next one guarantees you’ll be filling a critical seat under pressure, with worse options, at a worse price.
That’s a full topic on its own, how to actually build a development plan and a recruiting pipeline for an SMB that can’t afford a dedicated talent function, and I’ll get into that properly in another blog. For now, the short version is enough: don’t treat either one as optional.
Sometimes They Leave Anyway
LeBron almost certainly heard some version of this conversation too, from people at the Lakers with a lot more to offer than most SMB owners ever will. He left anyway. The literature has room for that outcome. Job embeddedness theory itself accounts for off-the-job pulls, family, geography, a completely different chapter of life, that have nothing to do with how well an organization is run (Mitchell et al., 2001). Self-determination theory says people need real mastery, and sometimes the next unit of mastery only exists somewhere else entirely, no matter how much autonomy and connection you’ve built (Deci & Ryan). None of that means the conversation, or the years of building fit and belonging before it, were wasted. It means retention was never a guarantee. It was always a probability you were working to improve.
I coached youth basketball for years too, and lost good players to programs I genuinely couldn’t compete with on resources. Same lesson, different room. For the founders and GMs I work with across Guelph, Kitchener-Waterloo, and the rest of Ontario, the real starting question is never just “how do I retain my best people.” It’s “what can I actually afford to build, how do I build it smart, and what do I say honestly when it still isn’t enough.” Do the work, have the real conversation, and accept that sometimes, like the Lakers this year, it still won’t be enough.
Sources
Mitchell, T. R., Holtom, B. C., Lee, T. W., Sablynski, C. J., & Erez, M., original job embeddedness research (2001), summarized in “The Story of Why We Stay: A Review of Job Embeddedness,” Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior: https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-031413-091244
“Self-Determination Theory and Workplace Outcomes: A Conceptual Review and Future Research Directions,” on autonomy, competence, and relatedness as core motivational needs: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11200516/
Research on psychological contract fulfilment and employee retention/turnover intention (2025): https://learning-gate.com/index.php/2576-8484/article/download/9470/3107/13039
Gallup, “42% of Employee Turnover Is Preventable but Often Ignored”: https://www.gallup.com/workplace/646538/employee-turnover-preventable-often-ignored.aspx
SHRM, 2026 Global Workplace Culture Report: https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/research/2026-global-workplace-culture-report
Forbes Coaches Council, “The Under-Challenge Crisis: When High Performers Quietly Disengage” (2025): https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbescoachescouncil/2025/10/27/the-under-challenge-crisis-when-high-performers-quietly-disengage/
Forbes, “How Small Market NBA Teams Win More With Less” (2025): https://www.forbes.com/sites/giovannimalloy/2025/06/26/small-market-nba-teams-win-more-with-less/
Yahoo Sports, “LeBron James leaving Lakers, reportedly plans to return for 24th NBA season with a new team” (2026): https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/breaking-news/article/lebron-james-leaving-lakers-reportedly-plans-to-return-for-24th-nba-season-with-a-new-team-160602493.html
Jim Collins, Good to Great, on “first who, then what”: https://www.monkhouseandcompany.com/resources/insight/7-important-lessons-from-jim-collins-good-to-great/
Bradford Smart, Topgrading method (only hiring A players, defined as the top 10% of available talent at any salary level): https://www.rhythmsystems.com/blog/finding-and-developing-a-players
Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, on Jobs’ “A players hire A players” philosophy: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/391717-steve-jobs-has-a-saying-that-a-players-hire-a
Hunter, J. E., Schmidt, F. L., & Judiesch, M. K. (1990), “Individual Differences in Output Variability as a Function of Job Complexity,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 75(1), 28-42: https://scispace.com/papers/individual-differences-in-output-variability-as-a-function-2inac5axyb
Fulmer, I., “Compensation and performance: A review and recommendations for the future” (2023), Personnel Psychology, on the incentive and sorting effects of pay: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/peps.12583
Momentum Search Partners, “What You Need to Know about Counteroffers” (2024), on why counteroffers often fail to address the real reasons someone was leaving: https://www.momentumlegal.com/news/surprising-data-about-counteroffers/
Hireborderless, “Best 50+ Workforce Analytics Tools in 2026,” on current AI flight-risk and engagement platforms: https://www.hireborderless.com/post/best-workforce-analytics-tools
INOP, “Predicting Attrition: How AI Flight Risk Models Are Rewriting the Rules of Employee Retention” (2026), on prediction accuracy rates: https://inop.ai/predicting-attrition-how-ai-flight-risk-models-are-rewriting-the-rules-of-employee-retention/
The details of my own early hiring mistake and my coaching experience are true; some specifics have been simplified for length.
The content of this article is shared for educational and informational purposes based on professional experience and does not constitute formal legal or HR advice. Employment relationships and retention strategies involve considerations that vary by individual circumstance. Before making material changes to compensation, management structure, or workplace policy, you should have those changes reviewed individually with a qualified HR professional.
