What's the best strategy to retaining top talent?
How do you retain top talent?
High-potential-high-achieving talents want to learn more, achieve more, break new personal ground, make more impact, drive more results.
Personal growth is their internal engine.
Your retention strategy follows:
Learning: Create multiple ways for people to learn new skills and hone their existing skills. (Your high achieving growth-seekers will value it the most and use it the most; it will also help them stand out from the rest).
Leadership: Give people the opportunity to opt into management and leadership programs and opportunities at the company, and coach them when they do opt in. (Not everyone wants to manage and lead, however, but a small fraction will want to give it a chance and will want you to know they do).
Mobility: Give people opportunities to move up and across the organization. (It reinforces learning and provides growth vectors they will value and use).
Your strategy is people-centric. It’s about people.
The double digit impact on talent retention—as well as on your business performance—is the “unintended consequences”, the by-product of the strategy.
Think people first.
The “connecting tissue” is skills: help people identify their strongest soft skills, their leadership and management skills, their creative and innovation skills, their people skills, their learning skills, as well as their gaps and development opportunities. Giving talents the critical knowledge of their skills informs them and helps them become better, learn more, opt into opportunities, and build their self-worth
Get serious about building the best business.
Steve Jobs' secret to success
Good morning! Jobs’ point is so powerful because business is all about people: their soft skill, character, and future potential. Your people are the Human Operating System of your business. Everything else derives from that. Your people’s potential determines your business potential. So make it your goal to get your business the very best people.
Mediocre companies vs Genius companies
Which one is yours? Which one are you building? How far will your strategy get you? Arthur Conan Doyle gave us this powerful insight: Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius. Mediocre companies tend to stay this way.
Harvard on How Recruitment Must Change
TLDR Recruiting is broken. Businesses must screen for social skills. Employers screen and select for experience and hard skills, totally overlooking the most critical dimension of applicants’ talent proposition: their social skills. This produces bad outcomes: selecting wrong hires, overlooking high value ones.