How I lost a young star

Recruiting and retaining talent is the most important piece of any leader’s day. I take a lot of pride in our track record at TINYpulse. In our Saigon office, to date (1.5 years in), we’ve only lost 3 out of 60 total team members whom we really wanted to keep. We invest a lot of time and energy into understanding the pains and desires of our team.

• Every two weeks we have an open discussion based on anonymous feedback
• I keep an open door policy
• We hold weekly 1:1s using our product Perform to keep track of goals and provide ongoing coaching feedback
• Each team has budgets for weekly team lunch
• We hold retrospectives every two weeks

Even with all these communication touch points, it’s hard to keep a pulse on the happiness of an individual at the micro-level.

I was talking to one of our leaders and his advice to me was to put more heart into my approach. I had to think about this a bit as I’ve always felt like I was overly emotional. I’ve heard people crack jokes at the fact I was teary eyed again at an all hands meeting.

But yet here I am reflecting on the fact it was likely my inability to emotionally connect with this incredibly talented young star that caused me to lose them. In our retrospective meetings we look back on the previous two weeks, draw lines to represent individual happiness over the sprint, list a few things that went wrong, a few that went right, then write up one or two action items to course correct. My hope is that this post will reveal a few things that will help people identify similar problems and take action to resolve them before your special talent walks out the door.

Here’s my take on what went wrong:

Inability to see the emotional insecurities

When dealing with a young star, often times on the exterior they look confident and are churning out great work. But inside, they aren’t sure. It’s their first rodeo in many cases. My young star was doing some amazing work in areas they had never touched before. A comment they made upon exit made me realize that they didn’t know how awesome they really were.

I give recognition. In fact, I’m the cheers leader for sent Cheers in our company (Cheers for Peers is our recognition tool). It just wasn’t enough. When someone is doing a task for the first time, it’s critical they receive recognition for it. Failure to do so births feelings of uncertainty, even in the most confident of people.

Failure to emotionally connect

At one stage in my young star’s career, I had promised we would get together more often and do lunch and/or grab drinks. I failed miserably at that. While I don’t have quantitative data, I’m pretty sure our text to speech ratio was in the 10:1 range. This is totally unacceptable, especially with a young star. I’m a busy person. I’m also the same person that says excuses are just one’s failure to set priorities. If my priority is recruiting and retaining top talent, building personal connections with my stars should always be at the top of that list.

I can’t believe how dumb I was here.

It’s really, really hard to own your own career 100%

We preach that we only hire leaders in our company. I believe we have done a pretty good job of that. The reality, is even the best leaders in the world need coaches. Prior to TINYpulse, I was a co-founder and CEO of an outsourcing company. During that time i used an outlet called forum in my Entrepreneur group (eonetwork.org). Forum is an awesome 4 hour session once a month where leaders get together and discuss their problems in a safe environment free of judgement or advice. Moving to TINYpulse I took on a #2 role. The CEO is one of the smartest people I know. I get a lot of great coaching on how to improve my career. I’ve been a founder and a CEO and it’s natural for me to own my career, present my ideas and get coaching advice. I’m not so sure that I had that ability at the ripe age of 24. Looking back on my young star’s career, they wanted more responsibility. They deserved more responsibility. I didn’t realize how much time was passing by without us revisiting that conversation. The day before their final departure I wrote up a great plan to provide them mentorship resources and learning opportunities that would get them to the next level.

I should have done that months earlier.

Principal based decision making will lead you the right direction 99% of the time, but it can also leave you standing alone wondering what happened.

I’ve heard some pretty intense implementations around life planning and principal based decision making. I’m not hard core from the perspective of documenting out life goals or principals that will guide me towards them. But, I do have a few that are pretty important to me. I like money to be an auxiliary goal, not a driver. I’ve always felt if you’re doing something you love, are really good at it and are creatively thinking of ways to expand the breadth of what you are doing, you’ll make a lot of money. People are all really different though. Without the ability to see life through their lens, it’s almost impossible to know what their drivers are. In many parts of the world, such as Vietnam, money is a critical driver. As little as a few hundred bucks can be a monumental difference in someones ability to solve a real life problem.

With my young star, I failed to take the time to look through their lens and understand what was driving this money conversation. I was very caught up on my principals governing how a money negotiation should be done.

Stop chatting, start connecting

Email, Viber, Slack, Skype, Confluence, Hangouts… The list of non-personal ways we connect at work is frightfully long. Constructive feedback, coaching, and especially anything remotely negative must be done in person. There are simply no exceptions to this rule. With a 10:1 text to talk ratio, you can imagine I slipped pretty bad on this one. In fact, after one talk in person on the subject, the rest of the communication up until the end was through email or chat.

I’ve learned a lot from my mini-retrospective. While you’re only supposed to apply 1–2 action items, I’m going to aim to make changes that address all five of my mis-steps.

Young stars are too precious to let fall out of the sky.