Ask our network: how to retain talent
Stop waking up in a cold sweat and send us your business challenge. We will research and find answers from current interviews, and put it to current interviewees and roundtable attendees. We’ll publish their answers here, and be sure to let you know. It may make for uncomfortable reading, but it’s coming from a good place…
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The question
Ben Gibbs, who has responsibility for performance management in a media and services company, asks this month’s question…
The merry-go-round. It’s destructive in sport and it’s destructive in business. How do you retain top talent?
The panel
This month’s answers come from digital power player, founder and CEO of Zuckerberg Media and editor-in-chief of Dot Complicated, Randi Zuckerberg; Chevron’s senior innovation capability strategist, Jack Anderson; all-American racecar legend and owner and CEO of Target Chip Ganassi Racing, Floyd ‘Chip’ Ganassi; and Google’s VP of people operations for global sales and business development, Liane Hornsey.
The answers
Randi Zuckerberg – “When I was working at Ogilvy & Mather, it was a very set career path. I knew exactly when I was going to get to each level. After two years, I would go from a system account executive to account executive, and then two more years. But when I went out to Silicon Valley and sat with my brother and the founding team of Facebook, it was clear that they were making all of these decisions on their own. It would have been reserved for a very, very senior team at Ogilvy & Mather… I probably wouldn’t have the opportunity to touch decisions like that for ten years in my career.”
Randi believes that if you’re good enough, you’re senior enough. Do you balance hierarchy with startup passion and speed? Can you give promising junior staff responsibility for smaller projects so they don’t walk away?
Watch Randi on the entrepreneur’s dilemma.
Jack Anderson – “The thing I’m most worried about, and I mean this with all my heart, is the inability of people who have great ideas to express themselves in a way that other people can understand. They have great ideas, they have inspirational thoughts, but there’s the big gulf or chasm between them and the people that can use those ideas or make a decision on them, or the value that they can add. I work in the technology management area at Chevron, and technical people’s ability to articulate their ideas in a way that other people can get it is the thing I worry about the most.”
No one should pretend that talent doesn’t leave for bigger wages, but don’t ever think that’s the only reason. Being able to speak your company’s language, to be understood and valued for that input – these things are vital. Are you bridging the communication gap?
Watch Jack on why innovation comes from tension.
Chip Ganassi – “We had a young driver, Jamie McMurray, come back to our team [in 2010]. He left around 2005 because he was offered a big contract by a big team. He went over there, didn’t have the results he was looking for. We stayed friends the whole time. He came back [and] out of the box we win the Daytona 500. It’s about getting the right athlete around the right group of people, and not being the cookie-cutter that all these other teams think that these drivers are. They want to put drivers in a box; put them all in cookie cutters, make them all drive the same car with the same attitude with the same people, same setup. It’s not about it at all. It’s a team sport, but you have to get the most out of each individual’s characteristics.”
Promoting the team and individuality is a difficult balancing act (Chip does go on to say ‘a star driver may be the focal point of the team, but he’s not the head of the team’), but get it right… The list of world-conquering examples from sport alone is enormous.
Watch Chip on managing conflict.
Liane Hornsey – “If you’re investing a great deal of time and energy getting the right people you do want to retain them. There’s no question. We retain them largely through the environment. It is definitely fun to work here. We have TGIF every Friday. Everyone stops work at say 4:30 around the world, local time difference, and they just get together for a drink and to socialize. Obviously we have the cafes where people come together at any time to eat together. We try to make this feel like a mix between work and social. There’s so very, very many clubs and so much that happens each and every night in every location around the world. So we do lots of things to bring people’s lives into Google and Google into people’s lives I would say, and I think that works. My problem is I hire brilliant people. So 95-99 per cent of my people are high talent. So we don’t use traditional methods. It would be wholly inappropriate when you have a talent pool such as Google to have high potential programs, for example. So what we tend to do – and we do a lot of it – we encourage a great deal of rotation and mobility. We also bring people together into project teams working on cross-functional, big company issues so that people can build skills and talents outside of their own function and their own area of expertise. We also spend an awful lot of time preparing people for management. I’ve often said that I was a manager for about 15 years before I knew how to do it. It’s often when you get very, very good individual contributors who are used to doing it themselves who are highly motivated, it’s very hard for them to manage people because that’s a very big transition, so we put lots of support in place. We have mentoring programs; all the stuff you would expect. We run what we call career gurus where we give advice to would-be managers. We have lower expectations of managers when they’re first in the job… So we recognize very, very clearly that it’s quite a difficult transition and some people don’t want to make it. For example, in engineering a lot of people stay as individual contributors and they’re perfectly happy with that and our pay scales and our promotion scales absolutely allow for that to happen.”
Clear progression, clear support, and the flexibility to reward people whether they choose management or individual contribution. If it works for a little known company like Google, hey, it might just work for you.
Watch Liane on Google’s hiring process.
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Adam has interviewed over 450 chief executives from Adidas to Zappos. He has spoken on communication, leadership, and innovation at several major conferences, for organisations as diverse as CA and CeBIT, and is Master of Ceremonies for a number of brilliant business events.