From the Managing Partner...

Many of us have had one of our star employees come into our offices and resign to pursue another opportunity and, if you’re like us, you probably thought about what you should have done differently in order to keep them. Last month’s Harvard Business Review article “How To Keep Your Star Talent” offers some insights into why our best employees, with the most promise, sometimes leave. The authors assert that fully a third of your high potential employees are not putting all their effort into their jobs and more importantly a quarter of them believe they will be working for another company within the next year. Finally, twenty percent of high potential employees do not believe their personal aspirations are in alignment with their current company.

June 2010 Feature

How To Keep Your Star Talent (from the Harvard Business Review)
One-quarter of the highest-potential people in your company intend to jump ship within the year. Here's what you're doing wrong. Go to article »

So, how do you identify, challenge, reward and keep your best employees? Well, it’s not easy and requires a lot of time, attention and work on the part of the executive leadership of the company. The central ingredient to a strong talent development program revolves around open, honest and clear communication with team members. This includes clearly testing and identifying the ability, engagement and aspirations of these employees and developing personalized and challenging growth plans. Rising stars generally do best in challenging roles, not maintaining the status quo, so don’t coddle them with assignments that are too easy for them. Instead, identify the company’s most difficult problems and get your rising stars to help fix them.

As you will see from the enclosed article, the key to keeping your top talent is an on-going process. Don’t assume they are engaged and happy just because they are currently doing a great job. Create individual development plans, reevaluate them often, and offer higher compensation. Just because the CEO isn’t taking a raise this year is not a reason to hold back (if possible) from recognizing the contributions of your best Directors and Vice Presidents who you hope will be running the company in a few years. Hold regular, open conversations with rising stars to make sure the company’s expectations and the aspirations of the employee are in alignment and make sure they know their future success is important to the success of the company.

The future of your business rests on the backs of the talent of your company. You probably want to be the type of company, boss and mentor that when someone like us calls to recruit your best assets away, they say they are not interested in leaving because they know their future lies within.

Price Harding, III
Managing Partner
pharding@carterbaldwin.com

How To Keep Your Star Talent

By Jean Martin; Conrad Schmidt: Harvard Business Review

Practically every company these days has some form of program designed to nurture high-potential employees. But a recent study by the Corporate Executive Board demonstrates that nearly 40% of internal job moves made by people identified by their companies as "high potentials" end in failure. Disengagement within this cohort of employees also is remarkable: One in three emerging stars reported feeling disengaged from his or her company. Even more striking, 12% of all the high potentials in the study said they were actively searching for a new job--suggesting that as the economy rebounds and the labor market warms up, organizations may see their most promising employees take flight in large numbers. Why do companies have so much trouble bringing along their next generation of leaders? The Corporate Executive Board's research showed that senior managers make misguided assumptions about these employees and take actions on their behalf that actually hinder their development. When dealing with high-potential employees, firms tend to make six common errors: assuming that all of them are highly engaged, equating current performance with future potential, delegating the management of high potentials down in the organization, shielding promising employees from early derailment, expecting stars to share the pain of organization-wide cutbacks, and failing to link high potentials and their careers to corporate strategy. These mistakes can doom a company's talent investments to irrelevance--or worse.

Read Full Article »

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