Retaining Talent

You could recruit the best people, you could be the best interviewer, you could be the best at making offers that get accepted but if you can’t retain these people then it’s all pointless. You’re fooling yourself if you don’t pay attention to retention because turn over that’s out of your control does more harm than good, because your reputation gets dragged in the mud by the employees you couldn’t keep.

Culture Triangle

When thinking about how to retain talent, you have to think about the importance of culture in your team. Retaining people isn’t hard, but retaining talented people is the tough part and funny enough, firing has more to do with retaining talented people than hiring. Think of culture as a organism that needs to be fed from multiple sources, you need to have people move through this system in order for you to have a thriving culture.  The Culture Triangle illustrates that if you spend more time on developing people you begin to retain them long term, and if you can’t develop them and make them perform like the rest of your team, you need to fire them.

As much as hiring and firing the right way are crucial, performance management is the key – that’s why they come to work for you!

The 365 Approach

You have to have the 365 approach to how you affect your people’s performance. In other words, have an ongoing dialogue with your employees to give them real time feedback on how they’re doing, what your objectives are for them along with your expectations of them. Do this every day – 365 times a year.

Have this be the first interaction you have with your new hire – on their first day – so there’s a constant theme to how your relationship will proceed from here on out. Give them your expectations of them and what it takes to perform well in your team. Culture is everything, you need to enforce that from the start.

If you can’t have daily interactions or reviews, have a weekly sit down with your team individually to do a review of how they’re doing. If they’re not doing well, they should know how they can get better. They also need to know what they’re excelling at - it will make them work even harder knowing that something they’re doing is impressing you. More importantly – that you’re paying attention. The positive sandwich – positive meat slapped between two slices of constructive criticism.

Fire Underperformers

Your culture is in serious trouble if underperformers are not fired. If you follow the 365 approach, this shouldn’t come as a surprise either. This employee should know they’re not performing well.

Give it enough time, but not too much. The 90 day grace period should give you enough to go on. Keep in mind - if you don’t talk to the employee about what they need to work on before firing them, that’s your fault that they haven’t performed. You need to own that in front of your team otherwise this firing could severely backfire on you and lead to people quitting on you in numbers.

Like anything else, you can overboard on anything and there are certainly hiring managers that have a reputation of being “trigger happy” when it comes to their employees. The trigger happy managers often get a taste of their own bullet sooner than they think. Put away the shotgun and work on constructing a better saddle.