Re-Recruit Your Best People
The more I see evidence of the Great Resignation, the more I believe it isn’t a crisis. It’s a choice. Weak leaders resign to the resignation. Strong leaders step up, fight back, and set an unwavering tone of perseverance, resiliency, and vision at every level of their company all the time.
People are going to leave. It happens. Don’t get mired in self-pity, anger, or defeat when it does. Put yourself in a position long before a key person leaves to feel peace that you did what you could to make them feel important, loved, and appreciated before someone else did. Have an attitude of re-recruiting your people at all times. In other words, if you needed them to join your company, what would you do to convince them that your grass is greener?
Never stop thinking that way. Never stop making your best people feel important to you. And never stop fighting back before the battle arrives at your door.
Here are the five best ways to actively earn the retention of your best people.
- Assume nothing. Never overlook those who have stayed, falsely assuming their loyalty or allegiance. Actively know their ambitions, motivations, and values. Invest in them. Help them be invulnerable to recruiting sales pitches by believing in their hearts that they’ve actively been recruited every day at your company.
- Focus on potential. Re-recruiting starts the day you onboard them, and it never ends. While celebrating the present, see the future value of your best people, and always consider the possibility that it may not be in the position they have now. Why? Because they’re doing the same thing.
- Be quick to offer appreciation and respect. Saying “Thank you” shouldn’t be a scheduled event or a rare encounter. Appreciation is a process. Feel it. Show it. Express it. Be humble in making others feel as though you couldn’t be successful without them. Respect what they have to say and be quick to celebrate the success of their ideas.
- Help them run it like they own it. Ask good questions and listen to the answers. If you’re not in a position to share equity with your best people, share thought equity and be quick to share credit. Be vulnerable, learning from every mistake, helping your people feel that you’re in the day-to-day with them.
- Live in the present. Yes, you should always be looking to the future, but live, work, love and laugh in the present. See the first point again, and don’t let the future get ahead of you. Does your compensation structure pass the dual test of marking-to-market and internal fairness? Are your expressions of gratitude monetized?
Avoid the crisis by neutralizing the possibility of crisis. Be the leader today that your best people can’t imagine being without.
Fitzgerald MSI provides clients with a talent management framework that helps them make better hiring, advancement and talent development decisions. We identify how people process information and make decisions, predict how they are motivated, and suggest how well they fit into the client’s culture. We help clients select the right people, and accelerate the onboarding and assimilation process to make them more productive, more quickly. And we help clients improve relationships among and between teams, manage training and development gaps, and identify next-generation managers and executive leadership. Mike Fitzgerald, the president of Fitzgerald MSI, created the company in 2002 to help clients achieve peak performance to improve the client experience, improve efficiency and productivity and enhance revenue. Clients include E *TRADE, TransAmerica, Direct General Insurance, HarlandClarke, Cendant Corporation, State Bank Financial Corporation, ING DIRECT (now Capital One), CHD Meridian Healthcare, Radio-One, Wilmington Trust Company, Morris Bank, and more. Fitzgerald is a former chief talent officer, president and CEO, chief operating, officer, and sales, leader. He is a certified practitioner in the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) and Hogan assessments. He’s been a consultant to Fortune-100 companies, startups, turnarounds, and served as an executive officer for companies as large as $4 billion. He’s an Economics graduate from the University of Massachusetts, a frequent speaker at industry events, and the author of three books on service quality, client experience management, and business communications.
