Regardless of the state of the labor market, organizations generally want to keep their high-performing employees. That means keeping them supported and engaged, so they’re motivated not only to stay, but to keep making their outsized contributions. Experts believe that we can learn a few things about managing rock-star employees from the world of neuroscience.

While it’s not realistic to expect managers—or even high performers, themselves—to become brain scientists, cribbing a few tips from this sector can help keep those lights on. Here are a few things that neuroscience tells us high performers need.

SAFETY

Threats come in different forms, and none of them are good for engagement or motivation, says HR expert Christy Pruitt-Haynes, a consultant at NeuroLeadership Institute, a global neuroscience-backed consultancy that works with Fortune 100 companies. When a threat is perceived, we shift cognitive resources to minimizing that threat, and tend to be less collaborative. “So, what managers really need to understand is how each of their team members are aligned to process threat and reward, so we can move them toward that reward state and away from that threat state,” she says.

Early in your career, you know the details of everything you’re working on. You have to, because you are generally responsible for those details. That is the core of being a frontline worker. You are carrying out key tasks that are central to the work of your organization. You may not have the full perspective on why the work is being done the way it is, but you do know a lot of details about what is happening.

The cost of this elevated perch is that you are further from the details of how things are being accomplished. You are not having the same kind of day-to-day interactions with the frontline work that you did earlier in your career. As a result, you may not be aware of important elements that might be crucial for strategic decision-making.

In order to have the detail you need to be effective in your leadership role, you need to have regular conversations with those people who are responsible for the details you don’t know, and you need to become a really good questioner and listener.

LET OTHER PEOPLE TALK

Promotions come with additional responsibility, but they also come along with more prestige and status as well. It is tempting to use these roles as an excuse to dominate the meetings you’re in by sharing your opinions and beliefs early and often.

There is certainly some need to share your thoughts on strategy with others, but great leaders let other people talk—a lot.

Many employees excel in hybrid or even fully remote work settings, outperforming expectations to deliver outstanding results. Others in the same roles struggle to work effectively outside the office, even if they have the same home office arrangements and are deemed equally talented by their managers.

Having helped 21 organizations figure out successful hybrid work arrangements and written a book on the topic, I can confidently state that employee personality differences represent one important driver of these seemingly random performance differences. My consulting clients found that by matching hybrid work arrangements to the relevant personality traits of their workers, they can optimize employee performance, resulting in a win-win for everyone involved.

MEASURING EMPLOYEE PERSONALITY

In assessing personality, it’s vital to use the right measurements. Avoid using tests that research shows poorly predict job performance despite their popularity, such as DiSC and MBTI. As the Harvard Business Review reports, “due to limited predictive validity, low test-retest reliability, lack of norming and an internal consistency (lie detector) measure, etc.,” they fail to predict job performance effectively.