How to Find Your Hidden High Performers: The ONA Playbook for CEOs and HR Leaders

Your performance review process is lying to you.

Not because your managers are dishonest. Not because your rating scales are wrong. But because the framework itself only captures what's visible , and the most important contributors in your organization are often doing their best work where you can't see it.

The engineer who onboards every new hire and keeps them from quitting in month two. The individual contributor who's been quietly mentoring three people who then got promoted. The account manager who other account managers call before big client meetings because she sees angles nobody else catches.

These people rarely top performance rankings. But remove them, and the organization bleeds.

This playbook shows you how to find them.

Why Traditional Performance Reviews Miss Hidden High Performers

Traditional performance reviews measure output and behavior along pre-defined dimensions. You rate people on what they were supposed to do.

What they don't capture:

• Network value: Who is this person helping beyond their defined role?
• Informal influence: Who actually shapes decisions, regardless of their title?
• Knowledge transfer: Who is building capability in others, not just producing their own work?
• Organizational glue: Who is making collaboration possible, absorbing friction, keeping people aligned?

The irony is that these are often the most critical contributions in a knowledge-work organization. And because they're not on anyone's job description, they're systematically invisible in standard performance systems.

Research on organizational networks consistently shows that 20–30% of the most valuable contributors to any organization are rated in the middle of performance distributions. They're not low performers. They're hidden performers.

What Is Organizational Network Analysis?

Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) is a method of mapping the actual collaboration and influence patterns in an organization , not the org chart (how it's supposed to work), but the network graph (how it actually works).

ONA captures:

• Who people go to for information
• Who they seek when they're stuck
• Who they consider most effective in their network
• Who helps others develop and grow

The output is a network map that shows centrality (who's connected to everyone), bridging (who connects otherwise siloed groups), and reach (whose influence extends beyond their immediate team).

Confirm's platform is built on this foundation. Every performance cycle generates network data that sits alongside traditional review scores , giving you two lenses instead of one.

The Playbook: 5 Steps to Surface Hidden High Performers

Step 1: Run a Baseline ONA Assessment

Before your next performance review cycle, run an ONA assessment across your organization. In Confirm, this happens passively during your normal review workflow , the network data is collected as part of how people engage with the platform.

You're looking for:

• High-centrality individuals: People whose names come up frequently across different teams when people are asked who helps them do their best work
• Bridge nodes: People connecting two departments or functions that wouldn't otherwise interact well
• Knowledge hubs: People others cite as the go-to source for learning a specific skill or process

This takes 15–20 minutes per person to complete in a structured ONA survey, or it emerges passively from review data in Confirm over time.

Step 2: Cross-Reference ONA Position with Review Scores

This is where it gets interesting.

Create a simple 2×2 grid:

• X axis: Performance review score (low to high)
• Y axis: ONA centrality / network influence (low to high)

You'll find four groups:

The bottom-right quadrant is where you'll find your most important discovery. These are people who appear average or below-average in reviews , but are highly connected, frequently sought out, and central to the network.

These people are often:

• Underpaid relative to their actual contribution
• Under-promoted because they don't self-promote effectively
• At high risk of leaving because they haven't been recognized
• Being considered for performance management when they should be fast-tracked

Step 3: Investigate Before You Assume

High ONA position alone doesn't mean hidden high performer. There are two other patterns to distinguish:

The Connected Non-Contributor: High centrality because they're involved in everything, but not actually adding value to those interactions. They're in every meeting but nobody learned anything, nothing got decided, no blockers got cleared.

Distinguish by asking: "When this person was involved, did the outcome improve or just involve more people?"

The Forced Bottleneck: Someone who's central because everything runs through them out of habit or politics, not because they're the best resource.

Distinguish by asking: "What happens to this work when this person is on vacation?"

When you identify someone in the bottom-right quadrant, do 3–4 quick interviews with their peers before drawing conclusions. Ask: "Can you tell me about a time when [name] specifically made your work better or easier?" The quality of the stories you get back will tell you everything.

Step 4: Map the Risk

Once you've identified your hidden high performers, the first thing to do is assess their flight risk.

Risk factors for losing your hidden high performers:

• Below-median compensation relative to their actual contribution
• Not promoted in 12+ months despite high ONA centrality
• Their manager doesn't know their ONA position (common if you don't have ONA data surfaced in your performance system)
• They've never had a career conversation that acknowledged their informal contribution

These people leave for one of two reasons: they get recruited (because their network inside made them visible to people outside), or they get overlooked long enough to stop caring.

In Confirm, you can set up alerts for network pattern changes , when a high-centrality employee's network begins contracting, that's one of the most reliable early signals of voluntary exit risk.

Step 5: Correct the Record in the Next Review Cycle

Finding hidden high performers doesn't do anything unless you change how they're evaluated and compensated.

Actions to take:

1. Compensation audit: Pull their comp relative to peers with similar output scores. Adjust if there's a gap.

2. Explicit recognition in the performance review: In Confirm, add ONA data to the review context. Reviewers should see both the output score and the network contribution before writing evaluations.

3. Promotion consideration: Review your last 3–5 promotion decisions. Were any of these people candidates who were passed over? Should the criteria be updated to include network contribution?

4. Career conversation: Have a direct conversation with these employees acknowledging their informal contribution. Many high-centrality individuals have never heard their own manager say "I know you're making everyone around you better , that's valued here."

What Changes When You Find Your Hidden Performers

Organizations that run regular ONA alongside traditional reviews report several consistent outcomes:

• Retention of the people who matter most: You can't retain what you can't see. Once these people are in your system with their real contribution documented, the next manager who threatens to underpay them gets flagged.

• Better succession planning: Hidden performers are often excellent candidates for leadership roles. They already have network authority; they just need structural authority to match.

• More accurate performance distributions: When you're calibrating team performance, having both output data and network data produces distributions that managers feel much better about. The "why did they get a 3?" conversations become less contentious.

• Faster identification of culture carriers: When you're considering layoffs or restructuring, ONA data tells you who you cannot afford to lose regardless of what their output score says.

Getting Started in Confirm

If you're using Confirm's talent management platform, ONA data is collected as part of your standard performance cycle. You don't need a separate survey infrastructure.

The five-step playbook above can be run on your next review cycle data:

1. Pull your ONA centrality scores from Confirm's analytics dashboard
2. Export review scores for the same period
3. Build the 2×2 grid (or use Confirm's talent matrix view)
4. Identify the bottom-right quadrant
5. Take the correction actions above

If you haven't started yet and want to see what your organization's network actually looks like, request a demo →

The Bottom Line

Your organization is full of people creating value that your performance reviews don't see.

Finding them isn't about being more generous with scores. It's about getting a second data source that captures what traditional reviews miss. ONA is that data source.

The recipe is five steps. The payoff is retention of people who would otherwise leave or be managed out , which is among the most expensive mistakes a growing company can make.

The best companies don't just measure performance. They measure contribution , and those are not the same thing.