Andy Walsh2x Exited Founder, Startup Strategist & Podcast Host

The 5-Question Exercise That Keeps Your Best Employees

20 Jul 2026 · 1 min

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In this short segment, the speaker introduces a practical five‑item stack‑rank exercise for managers and employees to clarify what matters most in compensation and career trade‑offs. The five dimensions are base salary, performance‑based bonuses, equity/ownership, skills or breadth of responsibility, and life‑flexibility. By asking employees to rank these items, the conversation forces a realistic prioritisation, revealing that not all factors are equally important to each individual. The speaker shares a personal example: after receiving a large base‑salary increase, he asked his boss to shift part of that increase into a higher performance bonus, demonstrating how the framework can lead to tailored compensation structures. The overall message is that the exercise is a helpful, conversation‑driving tool for aligning expectations and making informed trade‑off decisions.

Chapters

I think it's a great exercise where you essentially ask your employees to stack rank these 5 things: your base salary, performance-based bonuses, equity and ownership, what I'll call like your skills or breadth of responsibility, and your life flexibility. And when you ask someone to stack rank those, it really forces you to realize like, sure, we all care about all of those things, but you have to care about some more than the others. And at the time in my life where I was, and I had just gotten a big base salary increase, I remember my boss asking me and we realized base salary was not the thing that I cared about the most. And so we reworked it. I actually asked for less money on my base and more for my performance bonus. And that was a, it was a great conversation for him to present to me because it made me realize also, like, you can't have everything all the time. Like you've got to pick and choose where you're at. So I think it's a really helpful framework to talk with your employees about.