Keeping Good People
Once, perhaps back when you first entered the workforce, it was enough to land a job. It wasn't so long ago that working people were happy to simply have paychecks, and employers were glad to have productive employees. Then it becomes apparent that there's a difference between a job and a career. People no longer stay in the same job or work for the same company for all of their working lives. On average, people have three to five different careers and work for a dozen or more companies from the time they enter the workforce until the time they leave it. More of either is not uncommon.
Encourage employees to come up with two or three personal goals. An employee might set a goal to complete a specialty training program, undergraduate degree, or graduate degree. This accomplishment would clearly benefit the employee, but it has benefits for the company as well by making the employee more promotable or, at the very least, more knowledgeable.
Your company entrusts you with its most valuable resource — employees. It expects you to help your employees develop their skills and careers. Sometimes you want to do this anyway because they are good people who have really worked hard and you want to see them grow. You don't want to lose them, and you know they might quit without appropriate support. Sometimes you need employees to grow so that they can take on more responsibilities — and free you up for the same reason. If employees don't feel like they are growing, they become stagnant. Over time, the department will grow stagnant and so will the organization. It often doesn't require that much for you to provide the opportunities your employees want and need. You might try the following:
Create a departmental training committee so employees can assess training needs and present ideas for meeting them
Ask employees with particular proficiency in certain areas to conduct short workshops for other employees
Sponsor brown-bag lunch training sessions in which experts from other parts of the company or outside sources conduct short presentations during lunch breaks
Establish a mentoring program in which employees pair up to learn from each other
Use regular feedback to help employees improve their skills and performance. (See Chapter 13 for more on this.) Suggest different approaches to achieve better outcomes. Make sure that feedback is relevant to the employee and how he or she approaches job tasks and work responsibilities, not a comparison or criticism because the employee's work style differs from yours.
It might be your preference to work on an assignment without having your superiors checking in with you all the time and telling you what a good job you're doing. And that's fine — it works for you. From there, it's easy to assume all people are the same way or should be the same way, particularly if you have some employees who are like you in terms of work style. Being among people who share your characteristics reinforces your attitudes and behaviors.
With the shift in today's business environment from a domineering management approach to one that is more collaborative, managers often benefit from training in conflict resolution and mediation techniques.
Your perspective and work style might set you up to think that employees who need a lot of feedback are just brown-nosing to stay in good with the boss. Although of course office politics come into play with all people (even you) at times, there's a strong likelihood that these employees are just people who need the sense of structure that constant feedback provides. For such people, the manager is the one who defines the work group and its functions and thus is the most logical choice to go to for feedback. After all, you set the standards, and ultimately it's you who must be satisfied with the results.
This is reality — for you and for your employees. Make sure they each have the same opportunities to showcase their successes and achievements for you. Just be sure you know whether that apple-polishing employee is advancing the goals of the team and the company or feeding the beast. Take the time to ferret out the true objective before you come to a conclusion. When an employee attempts to communicate with you at the expense of the team leader or coworkers, send the employee back to the group to communicate appropriately. Sometimes the employees doing the most communicating have the most time to do so because the real performers are too busy doing the work.
