Harmonics

The retention of talent is the number one challenge for so many HR professionals right now. Here, I share four strategies to help you address your talent retention challenges.

Strategies to retain talent in a changing workforce

Managing the “I want it now” population – It is important to be realistic about how long you expect talent to stay. If you are hiring someone in their 20’s or 30’s, they are looking for new experiences to grow their career. They want it now. They don’t want to wait like the generation before them. Recent research has shown that, on average, talent get itchy feet after 18 months and want the next new project to give them a new challenge. They have learned, grown on the job and are hungry for career progression. If you, as their employer, can’t deliver a new opportunity for them, they are a flight risk and will begin to explore new opportunities externally.

Knowing this timeframe of 18 months is a critical time to introduce Career Coaching Conversations. However, too often organisations are directing their people to a Learning Management system that offers mandatory training but does not meet their need to assess their next new career move. If your organisation wants to retain talent, you need to help your people discover what they really want next in their career. Then you can share how your organisation can meet their future career development needs. These career conversations are too often happening as part of an exit interview when your best talent has handed in their notice and it’s too late.

Supporting Managers who “Don’t want to talk about it now” – Managers don’t want to have career conversations with their employees because they fear they will be unable to meet their career expectations. This “want it now” talent population are often looking for promotion, more money and a sense they are making progress and climbing the career ladder. They are most likely looking to get a mortgage and want to bring their base salary up to a level that is attractive for a bank to lend them money. Organisations need to marry the reality of what it can afford and offer with how their talent can become more marketable when they leave and then need to support their managers in having those conversations.

Managers need to become more skilled at empathising, understanding what people want and then educating and communicating the reality of what they can offer. It is a manager’s role to help their people to understand that Organizations have become flatter and career progression is not just about promotion. Managers need support so they can face up to career conversations to help their people build a picture on how they can co-create skills and knowledge building opportunities that may not be just about promotion, but helping their people become much more valuable in their career future.

Be prepared to “Let them go” – I wish organizations were more realistic and set a timeline of five years as a great tenure for talent to stay these days. If a 5 year goal is set, then the employer can create a new psychological contract with their talent – that is, “You help us to grow our business and we will keep giving you experiences to help you grow your career”. In a world where jobs are unlikely to be permanent, employers and employees need to add value to each other. Reid Hoffman co-founder of LinkedIn suggests employees invest in the company’s adaptability and employers invest in employee’s employability. This makes so much sense as the new psychological contract for work, yet I come across many organisations that close their minds to the idea of enhancing their employees’ employability for fear they will leave. Get to know your people, their motivations and aspirations, this will enable you to match them with skills building projects and new experiences – giving them the opportunity to learn and grow. Then, like you would with an adolescent leaving home after secondary school, you just to let them go.

Success should be seeing them flourishing elsewhere knowing they made a great difference while they stayed and that you enabled them to achieve their career goals. It is not good for talent to stay in one organization for too long. They need to learn new skills, knowledge and experiences in new environments that you will likely never be able to offer them. Wish them well and they will share with others how you helped them be the best they can be. They will become a referral network for you to attract new talent. Having a realistic goal of 5 years gives you a return on your career development investment and sets you both up for a win-win.

Understanding different cultures – Last week, I was coaching an IT Manager who had recently joined a traditional organisational to drive a change agenda. Her remit from her new Head of Function was to scope out the changes they needed to make and to lead and drive this change project. She scoped out the change and met with the key stakeholders to outline and communicate the change that was needed across divisions. There was a lot of resistance to any change being implemented. The managers had long service and this change would impact their roles. They had too much invested in the past and were of a fixed mindset. This new manager had come from working in smaller start-ups and was struggling with the slow-moving nature of this culture.

I advised her to meet her Head of Function for a chat to discuss her remit to drive change and to help her understand the politics and how the culture really worked in there. She needed to learn how to drive change in a traditional culture and her Head of Function needed to help her navigate the politics of her new employer. She hadn’t spoken to her new boss for fear they wouldn’t understand, but the reality was neither had spoken to each other and it could have ended in her leaving out of frustration with the new culture. Our coaching conversation helped her to see all perspectives before she made a rash decision to leave. This intervention helped her to re-calibrate and see this new project as a new challenge she had not experienced before rather than rushing out the door to a new employer. The conversation with her Head of Function resulted in both taking a half day off-site to clarify and align their vision and strategy. The very worst thing that could have happened was her Head of Function didn’t listen and then she would have known for sure the culture was wrong. What she found was a renewed commitment to drive her change agenda.

At Harmonics we have been developing a programme of career development activities with our clients to help them align the realistic career progression opportunities with the needs of talent that ‘want it now’. These include:

• Career Conversations Workshops to equip Managers to have realistic career discussions
• Female Career Acceleration Coaching to target growing Female Leaders within Organisations https://www.harmonics.ie/women-finding-career-gear/
• Customised Mobile Career Portal for career coaching on the move for all employees https://www.harmonics.ie/career-management-portal/
• A range of informative Career Talks including the 4 Aces https://www.harmonics.ie/interview-justine-negri/
• Speed career coaching clinics at regular times each year to retain talent when they may be thinking about making their next move.
• Measuring the Career Pulse of your people through 7 key questions in a simple to use engagement survey

“The best way to predict your future is to create it” – Stephen Covey

To learn more about our programmes, please contact Harmonics on 01 8942616, 061 336136 or 021 7319604 or email info@harmonics.ie

John Fitzgerald is the Founder of the Harmonics Group. Harmonics specialises in helping organisations plan for change, manage change and support their people through change.

Diarmuid called me all excited, he had just been offered a new role. I had coached him in the past through a messy time in his career when he was being forced out of a company. It had drained him of confidence and it took a while for him to pick up the pieces. Years moved on and he did well in his next role. Now he was calling to let me know about his latest job offer and ask some questions about his package. As we got to talk about this new role, it became clear to me that Diarmuid was about to make the same mistake he made before. I asked him some pertinent questions to which he began to waffle his way through the answers or didn’t have the answers because he hadn’t asked. We agreed to meet for a coaching session to go through everything to ensure he was making the right move. In this article, I will share the 4 critical question sets that I brought Diarmuid through which will help anyone considering their next career move.

Moving into a new role is stressful, emotional and all consuming.  Deciding to join a new employer is often a much bigger decision than moving to a new role internally. You are going to be in a fish bowl and everyone is looking at the new person in the office. Plus the stats are against you – between 40%-60% of management new-hires fail within 18 months. This happens mainly due to miscommunication and lack of clear expectations at the start of the relationship between both parties. The employer or line manager may have been surprised the new hire hasn’t lived up to expectations or the new hire has not seen their own expectations realised. Either way, it could have been avoided with greater due diligence on both sides.

The four critical questions to ask before accepting a new role

From our experience, some of the key foundation stones need to be put in place early on. The 4 question sets I went through with Diarmuid were critical and needed to be addressed upfront and not after he made the move. If you don’t, one of these will most certainly be the reason your new role won’t work out.

I would encourage everyone to script the answers to these questions and have the courageous conversations upfront. Don’t assume and don’t accept a deflection. Gaining clarity will either set you up for success or indicate concerns early on. Don’t accept the first answer you receive, dig deeper. The interviewer is often only giving you their point of view which may not be the full story. It is best to ask more than one person in the interview process these questions. You will be surprised by the variance in answers you receive. I ask my coachees to frame their question under these 4 headings, so we can review what they have heard. I also encourage you to take the emotion out of answering these questions. We are inherently biased to liking people like us. This is no indicator of job success -to be managed by someone like us.

1-Context – Gain as much information as you can upfront on your new employer through internet searches, glassdoor, searching through LinkedIn profiles of people who work there or have worked there. Find out what is the current company situation, are they in growth, who are their competitors and why are they looking to hire someone like you? Who has succeeded and/or failed in this role in the past and why? What is possible from a resourcing and budget perspective in helping you achieve what you want and what is not? Following the interviews, make written notes to describe the culture and values there? What in your opinion will the CEO do and never do and what will your Line Manager do and never do?

2-Clarity – Is there agreement and clarity on your role and your boss’s role and what success looks like for you both in 3,6,12 months, 3 years? Is their clarity on how fast business goals change and the requirement to review these on a regular basis? What is their big challenge right now? How can you help solve this challenge? Do they know and understand your ways of working? Is this acceptable, do they see any challenges to how you like to work? Having reflected on this information, note where you see potential for conflict or differences of opinion. Reflect now on your own career history, what is your Achilles heel and how can you change your behaviour to make this role a success. This is a step up opportunity to make a behaviour change. What made you a success to date may not be important in this role. Clarity is key.

3-Collaboration – Have you and your boss acknowledged your different working styles? Find out their working and personality style and values important to them. Ask them to describe the best person that has ever worked for them and with them? What did they see as great about what they did and how they achieved their goals? Most Organisations include a psychometric profiling instrument as part on the interview process. It is important as part of your own development to have completed a battery of instruments to get feedback to gain greater self insight, so you are not surprised by any results as part of the process. It is also important for your interviewers to share insights and describe the team members that you will be working with if you took the job. What would they see as potential watch outs for you in your new team and other teams across the business? Think how you can influence based on what you know.

4-Coaching – It is my experience that this is a missing piece in the jigsaw. Organisations pay recruiter fees to find the right candidate and then fail to support them in their development. Managers are so busy today that the onboarding process is often rushed and needs to be improved. Ask if they offer onboarding or First 100 Day coaching to new hires to accelerate their performance. Ask about how they manage and develop talent.  Are mentors available? What does mentoring look like there? Ask to hear about examples. Thinking you can do it all on your own is the BIG Mistake. This is NOT a sign of weakness asking for coaching, it is a sign you are serious about your future performance. No High Performer succeeds without one! And lastly don’t be afraid to change coach depending on your development needs.

In Diarmuid’s case, there were just too many questions that remained unanswered when he went back to gain greater clarity on the role, scope and his ability to achieve. The previous incumbent had failed due to lack of resources and support. There was a lack of clarity in his role and while he connected very well with his new Boss-to-be, there were just too many unknowns. With a heavy heart he turned down the role. At first, he felt he had missed a chance to move as he had itchy feet and was looking for a move, when the job offer came along. He really was excited what he could achieve but, deep down, he knew he would have failed just like his successor. It was the right decision for Diarmuid in the long run. He has seen from the outside that the new hire has not worked out. As I said to him, you don’t need to take the first bus that comes along. Instead, do your due diligence, know the bus you want to take, who the driver is and where it is going and then there will be no unexpected surprises when you climb aboard!

“Select in haste, repent at leisure.” – Brian Tracey.

If you are interested in finding out about Executive, Business or High-Performance Coaching, we can arrange for one of the Harmonics Specialist team to meet with you and ask you critical questions to make our intervention a success and the right solution in the long run!

Please contact Harmonics on 01 8942616, 061 336136 or 021 7319604 or email info@harmonics.ie