21st Century Leadership Tools Your Executive Team Needs to Retain Top Talent
According to Gallup, U.S. companies lose $1 trillion in voluntary turnover every year — that doesn’t include lost time, lowered team morale, and the reduced customer service threshold businesses face by losing their top talent. If you want to understand how to retain your top performers, you first have to know what makes them leave. In an economy where there are more opportunities than ever from competing businesses ready to romance your top performers and the ability of your best talent to strike out on their own as freelancers or business owners, it’s time to take retention seriously and invest in creating a workplace that fosters long term careers with loyal employees who refuse to leave — even for better pay. Here are the leadership tools you need to combat the top reasons that lead to almost 77% of employee turnover.
Career Development Programs
The top reason employees voluntarily leave (for a few years running now) is a lack of career development. With millennials and generation z talent coming up the ranks, they have a strong value for learning, growth, and becoming a better asset to the company. In the past, these employees have been chastised for wanting to be treated as special unicorns without paying their dues. However, research shows that these team members simply want to contribute something that matters to the overall company and the people the company serves. They want to make a difference. Combine that desire to make a difference with the information overload at their fingertips every day, and you have a recipe for a high margin of error when trying to self-educate.
Your team members are already seeking out knowledge intentionally and often. As a company leader, guiding that quest for knowledge and development can lead to stronger employee satisfaction and loyalty. Besides, if you want your team to act or carry out tasks in a certain way, it’s better for the company to invest in that education and training so that you have cohesive systems and processes in place that your team members know how to maximize for higher productivity and profits.
In case you have a little fear perking up of team members leaving for a competitor after you invest time, money, and resources into their career development, fear not. Team members that you invest resources in and provide advancement opportunities to are more likely to deepen in their loyalty to you than leave. If you’re noticing a trend of employees leaving after the company invests in their career development, that’s a symptom of a major leadership or toxic culture issue at play that also needs to be addressed.
Work-Life Checks and Balances
The second highest reason companies experience turnover is for greater work-life balance. Technology has been a blessing and a curse. In the late ’80s, when you didn’t want to work after hours, you just left your landline off the hook and watched TGIF with the kids. Today, you’ve got a cell phone, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, email, and at least two other methods of communication that you’re expected to check regularly — even after hours. That leaves no time for your people to decompress and fill their cup so they can show up rested and ready to give you their best.
While there will always be projects that require all hands on deck and after-hours attention, that shouldn’t be the norm. If the work-life balance goes unchecked, creating more work and stress on your team than necessary, you’ll start to see your team burning out.
Burnout is an occupational phenomenon with serious consequences. Burnout in its early form will cause increased fatigue, brain fog, and focus issues. If burnout progresses, it can lead to mental breakdowns, weakened immune systems, nervous system damage, depression, and even suicide. This is not something to be taken lightly with the number of studies, surveys, and reports available now. It’s time for action.
One of the best ways to keep work-life balance from driving your people away is to create checks and balances that preserve a healthy work-life balance. Wellness programs are not enough to help your people in this area. Working out, eating healthy, and meditating are all great tools for a strong foundation, but if you take the stress jackhammer to the slab of concrete, it’s going to break. What you need to implement are burnout prevention programs with strict systems and processes that protect your people from being overworked and overstressed.
This is a combination of wellness education and practices, leadership development, boundaries for after hours behavior and communication, and reasonable workload and timeline expectations. Another way to ensure work-life balance is to make sure you have the right team members in the right positions. Behavioral assessments can show you which team members work well in fast-paced environments, and which ones need to work differently. By curating your team to function cohesively and complimentarily, you set them up for success while ensuring the work-life balance necessary to keep your team functioning in high-performance mode.
Leadership Development With an Emotional Intelligence Emphasis
The third-place winner for reasons your top talent quits is managerial behavior. Managers are the first round of leaders that your team works with, and they’re the ones with the most access to your top talent. Undeveloped managers can play favorites, pick on certain employees, and kill your team’s productivity — all while creating a liability nightmare for you to handle.
Luckily, there are a few ways to turn this around and protect the company against managerial behavior issues.
First, implement a leadership development program that all managers and company leaders have to go through on a regular basis. The greater their leadership skills, the better they can serve in that position. Make sure your leadership development program focuses on emotional intelligence. If your managers can’t relate to others or don’t have the ability to take a step back before interacting with team members to examine the potential outcomes of that conversation (and how it could make that team member feel), then you have a ticking time bomb on your leadership team. That’s not going to help you with turnover.
Emotionally intelligent leaders are able to make better decisions and think before they act. They also have the ability to better support and motivate the team.
Beyond that, when considering someone for a managerial position, it’s not enough to consider their time with the company and their knowledge of the roles. Managers need to be strong leaders that can get the team to perform without resorting to fear or forceful tactics. Creating a system and process of hiring that considers how well your candidates are with communication, emotional intelligence, self-awareness, problem-solving, and dispute resolution will go a long way in preventing managerial abuses, negligence, or misconduct.
If you’re ready to take on the new decade with a strong company, these leadership tools are non-negotiables in your tool belt. Which one are you going to focus on first?
