Employee Retention through deServing Leadership

As we look at our 2020 goals and our transition from a startup to a mid-sized high growth organization, maintaining our culture, sustaining employee engagement and retention has been top of mind for me.

Traditional organizational studies indicate that compensation, benefits, work environments, and organizational affiliation are some of the prime factors of talent retention (Mosley and Hurley, 1999). But as we have begin to hire and engage the next generation of employees, I contend that providing challenge, autonomy, respect, opportunities, and variety can help improve retention as these environments are hard to find. Talent management, work-life balance, and retention strategies far outweigh traditional emphasis on compensation and career advancement as significant influencers.

So how do we apply deServing Leadership principles to engage and retain employees?

Here are a few ideas:

Understand the needs of your employees: Provide career advice and relevant training programs that align with and help employees employees understand their career path.

Mentor: Knowing the expectations of employees and their internal and external motivations can enhance job satisfaction.

Be Present: As simple as it sounds, finding time to be present with your employees outside of meetings and performance reviews can go a long way in having highly engaged teams. Employees do not care what you know until they know that you care.

Facilitate: In my previous blogs, I have spoken about individual empowerment and failing forward as fundamental deServing Leadership principles. Learning the difference between facilitating and micro-managing can be instrumental in having constantly engaged employees. Employee mistakes can sometimes be a part of the journey and provide some of the best opportunities for growth.

Make it personal: As Jim Rohn said, “A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better.” Meeting every employee where they are and providing tools, resources, and guidance to better everyone’s skill is imperative to retention.

Show Gratitude: As I mention in my last blog, you must show genuine gratitude to those around you. Gratitude must be rapid, timely and personal. You must take the time to do it right.

As Simon Sinek says, “Working hard for something we don’t care about, is called stress. Working hard for something we love is called passion”. Retaining employees through deServing leadership boils down to one thing — creating and sustaining workplaces, mission, values, and vision that employees feel passionate about.