You need to wake up and discover how to keep the best employees. Your best employee is about to enter your office and give you notice that they are leaving your company for good. It will be polite and disguised as an opportunity to grow or betterment of the family. You will suppress the surprise and hide your disappointment. You will feel nausea and your head will pound. You are in shock. You will eventually progress through all five stages of grief. You will experience denial, anger, bargaining and eventually acceptance.
We are in a war for top talent. If you have high-performers on your payroll, someone is targeting and tempting them at this very moment. They are being offered more money, more opportunity, more, more, more. And, sadly you have taken them granted. You haven’t told them how special they are. You haven’t told them how much they mean to the team. You haven’t shared your vision and dreams for the future and how they fit into the new reality. You just plotted along the path like a baby sheep clueless of the pack of wolves lurking in the bushes.
Now you are the victim of the predators coming to take your best people. It is not over. Once they taste the blood, they will want more. Who can they take next? And worse, your former employee has joined the pack and will help them identify other talented individuals on your team.
What can you do? First, wake up and realize you are in a battle. Get your head out of your…the sand. Next conduct a talent premortem. A premortem is a managerial strategy in which a team imagines that a project or organization has failed, and then works backward to determine what potentially could lead to the failure of the project or organization.
A talent premortem applies the same principles to proactively retain key talent. There are twelve steps:
People do not leave jobs. They leave people. Keeping top performers must be the highest priority in today’s labor market. Let your competitors have the poor and mediocre performers. You will have more room for top performers. You are still going to have casualties in this war. Make sure this is minimized by following these steps.
I am sad for those getting the notification today. Losing good people is difficult. However, losing great people can be devastating to a business. A talent premortem is defensive. Simultaneously, you must go on offense to find new talent. Together this forms two of seven elements of a written talent strategy. Click the link to read the article.