In the first half of this series, we explored some “low hanging fruit” for keeping your workforce. Here, we are looking at investing to keep your top talent.
“Investing” may sound like this is where the cost-effectiveness of our first article ends. That isn’t so. Investing is putting time and money and effort into an activity, so that you reap the rewards richly and for years to come. As a matter of fact, investing in your people will often yield better and more sustainable impact results than throwing cash at a problem.
Executive Coaching: tailored support to help you recognise and retain talent
Let’s start with something that can be done in-house or by accessing external support, at modest cost: Executive coaching. With its personalised approach, this is a strategic tool for retaining top talent. It communicates a clear message: your organisation is invested in the success of your leaders. How does it do this? By providing tailored guidance to key individuals within the organization, executive coaching enables individual leaders to have the opportunity to “press pause” and leave the hurly-burly of the inbox behind for some dedicated headspace.
In today’s hectic business world, time to think is often listed as one of THE things missing from leaders’ lives. This investment not only enhances leadership skills but also instills confidence and a sense of value in employees, making them more likely to stay and contribute to the organisation’s growth. And let’s be clear, this works for the high achievers and your top talent. In addition, it works for everyone else!
There are two ways you can offer executive coaching. You can hire a professional external coaching provider (like us). Always look for trained, qualified, experienced and preferably accredited coaches.
The other alternative is to offer coaching by your workforce, for your workforce. This has the obvious complexity of perceptions, hierarchies and workplace interpersonal skills. It is, however, an excellent way to offer personal development to your workforce in a way that works for the whole organisation. This is not something just for HR because “they’re the people people”. It is important that coaching is offered only by properly-trained staff. Those can be everywhere from the Board to the contact centre, and anywhere in between. It will require investment to have your people trained. However, once trained they will be able to offer you a return on that investment, every single day.
Management Consulting: external support for an holistic approach
This is for the organisation where you suspect you may need more of an overhaul than coaching, mentoring and basic courtesy will achieve. Management consulting involves investment to keep your top talent. External advisers focus on your organisational culture and performance. Internal talent development and how best to do it will no doubt feature as part of their recommendations. When organizations prioritise the growth and development of their employees, they signal a commitment to building a sustainable and thriving workforce. An external pair of eyes can sometimes see what is hiding in plain sight for you. This is particularly so, if you are not giving yourself the headspace to consider all your options.
A canny way to make external consultancy work well for you as an investment, is to identify ambitious and thorough high-performers from your workforce. Then offer them the opportunity to work alongside the consultants. This knowledge transfer can really pay dividends. This is because the individuals will feel valued and are likely to give of their best as a result. This in turn will help their best to improve still further.
And if they feel valued and their work is appreciated, you stand a good chance of keeping them for the longer term. That is good news for your organisation and for your workforce, because they will share their skills and knowledge, building a consultant mindset which will underpin continuous improvement across your organisation. And who doesn’t want that?
Business Management: integrating keeping your top talent into the every day
Sometimes a spin-off from external consultancy is an alteration to your organisation’s business management. This gives you the opportunity to embed talent development in your organisational objectives and cultural structure. Put simply, it helps you embed growing your people while you grow your business. Where there is a culture of feeling valued, supported and empowered, workforce turnover can be much lower. This makes investing to keep your top talent something you can grow from within.
Leadership Training Programmes: investing to keep your top talent
The final section of this article is perhaps where you might have thought we would start. Structured leadership training programmes are a well-trodden path. On the face of it, they appear a proactive way to retain staff by investing in their continuous development. When organizations provide access to high quality and relevant leadership and management courses, they empower employees to acquire new skills and stay current in their roles. These programmes can not only enhance current job performance but also prepare employees for future leadership positions within the organisation.
Please note my caveat: “high quality and relevant leadership and management courses”. The internet is full of generic, “sheep-dip” courses which are cheap, offered for a quick buck to woo the unsuspecting into more lucrative (and just as generic) management courses. These are most definitely not the way to go. Investing in these is not investing in your talent. Instead, it is investing in an expensive sticking plaster, which is never going to stem a haemorrhage (metaphoric or of your staff).
I would always advocate bespoke leadership and management development courses, where you have been very specific in your commissioning brief, and where you and the provider monitor the programme progress constantly. You may even end up tweaking the programme to get the best out of the programme, so you get the best out of your people.
Ultimately, you will get what you pay for, in terms of developing your people. To enable your workforce to mentor one another, they will need training so they keep safe boundaries and are effective. To coach one another will require the same.
However … it will cost nothing to acknowledge your workforce for their effort and commitment. And for this acknowledgement to be genuine and heartfelt. Although that costs nothing, it can mean more than the most expensive consultancy programme ever could.
Investing to keep your top talent is a choice. I would argue it is a wise, prudent and forward-thinking choice, so long as you have the money to invest. Organisations that prioritize the growth of their internal talent pool (in both size and quality) create a workforce that is not only skilled but also deeply committed to the success of the organisation.
And this is key. The talent pool includes EVERYONE. You may have identified your top performers, but by widening the developmental opportunities out to everyone, you build an inclusive culture. This is crucial to deliver psychological safety at work – one of the first stages is for people to feel that they belong and are welcome. Nail that, and you will have a culture that grows and retains talent for you.
As ever, if you would like to discuss any of the issues in this article or its previous half, please feel free to book a conversation with me or to drop me a line. It’s so important to get more corporate cultures valuing and growing talent. Let’s make leadership easier, together.