A short YouTube presentation by Clegg offering three practical tips to retain top-performing employees: (1) continue coaching and developing them rather than assuming they "know it all"; (2) connect their personal/professional goals to organizational objectives through regular conversations; and (3) respect their strengths and avoid offloading others' work onto them. The video emphasizes the personal connection between leader and employee as central to loyalty and encourages leaders to invest time in key people.
Chapters
If you're a leader, you understand how hard it is to retain your top talent. When you have people that can deliver results, especially in the digital era, what they do is highly visible to the public. So your top talent has the potential to get poached every single day. And you understand how costly and disruptive that can be to your team to lose a key player. That's why you need to follow these three tips. I will show you how to keep your star employee from quitting. Number one. Don't assume your top producers are know it alls. And what I mean by that is it's clear that they're highly competent in their role. But don't make the assumption that they know everything about it. Your top performers still want to be developed. They still want to be coached. They want to achieve higher and higher every single day, week, month and year. And the only way that they're going to be able to achieve that is with your coaching and development. And by doing this, they'll know that you value the work that they're doing. But if you ignore them, they might feel taken for granted or that you really don't care. So don't assume your top producers know it all. Give them the support that they deserve. Number 2. Connect their goals with their work. Another way to retain your top employees is to connect their personal and professional goals with the goals of the organization. But you can't do this if you don't know what they want. You have to understand where are their passions? What is the emotional connection to the things that they want to achieve. You have to have regular conversations with them. This is one of the largest leader issues that I see, leaders complaining, I don't have enough time to spend with my key people. You don't have another option. Spend the time, commit the time. It's important and they deserve it. Or otherwise you'll have another great leader from another organization that will do that for you. So just don't assign them tasks. Show them how what they achieve, how that's connected to the overall goals of the organization. This will allow them to help see work's purpose, impact, and the value that you have for them. Three, don't penalize their gifts by giving them work that others cannot complete. It's important that you respect the talents and the strengths of your top producers. Sometimes because they're so capable, we think that they can take on more than they already are, even if it's unrelated to their core skills. We have to be careful not to dump the work of others into, especially those that are lower performers on our top producers because when we do that, we're taking them off of their core focus. And at the end of the day, we're telling them, hey, you're going to take on and pick up the slack from these other people that aren't performing. At some point they're going to get very resistant to that and they're going to resent the entire process. So don't penalize their gifts because of the lack of work of others. So there you have it. Three simple tips to retaining your top producer and and these are tips that you can apply today. If you follow them, you'll keep your star employees happy and engaged and committed to being loyal to the organization. But more importantly, being loyal to you. Because it's about the personal connection that matters. As usual, like comment and share. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where all things are leadership and personal development.
