What retention strategies have you found successful?

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Answer

Not to sound derogatory, but if you’ve just started to pick up on how to be a good person by caring about your coworkers and employees, you should have done that before COVID. You should have made sure to reach out to your team and talk to them long before the pandemic. When I was coaching my teams in 2018, and even before that, I knew that was something I had to do.

That is one of the reasons why I have been fairly successful with retaining talent. I've even helped them move out when it was time. I’ll tell folks, "You've outgrown everything we can do in this organization. Let me help you move out." It’s painful because I know I’ll have to backfill the role, but it is part of a cultural piece that we've been realizing throughout the globe in the last couple of years. That's why everybody now has the ability to say, "No, I don't want that job. I can actually make less money and be happier."

Answer

I read Leadership is Language by David Marquet, and it explains that most of our modern business is based on the industrial revolution mindset, but it's completely broken. In fact, there's no proof that it ever worked. Tapping into people's motivation, caring about what they think and realizing that your power comes from your staff is a huge part of the book. I've always preached that as well.

I used to be somebody's right hand person and when I got into leadership, that was the first thing I looked for: Who can I count on to do all the legwork and understand everything there is to know about this? Then when I find them, I have to listen to them. But I also have to make it a good experience for them by identifying where they need development.

In strengths-based leadership, you want to give people things they'll be awesome at, but people also want to work on one thing that they know they should improve. People struggle with improving more than one thing at a time, so it's hard. But I’ve found that leadership is probably my biggest passion. I thought my passion was technology but it turns out I like humans better, so that's cool.

Answer

I read an article on Pulse about Gautham Pallapa’s book, Leading with Empathy, and it gave me a lot to think about. I'm very technical and my mindset was always focused on climbing the ladder, getting results, get things done. I thought that, as the leader, you need to just get the team in order and leave the emotions aside. But with the pandemic, you start to see that that's not the proper way. At the end of the day, we are all humans. I started thinking more about empathy and emotional intelligence before reading that article, but it validated their importance. We are a relatively small company, so there will always be another bigger company that can offer a higher salary. But from what I've seen, the employee with the biggest salary isn’t always the happiest one, or the one who will stay on the team the longest. So salary is not always the determining factor.

What retention strategies have you found successful?

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