Finding Good Talent: (Series 1) Competition

Competition: Hopefully every CEO starts out wanting to do good things with the companies they create or run.  The need for ethical and empowering leadership is greater today than it has ever been.  Keeping good workers is hard and unless your employees believe in the company and its leadership it becomes even harder.  Additionally, with LinkedIn and other social networking sites, your workforce has their resume online and available to your competition full time.  Your competition isn’t just those that directly compete with you.  For example, any time you’re seeking a great VP of Marketing, you’re competing with every other company that is seeking the same regardless of their industry.  In a series of conversations with a Social Networking executive, when a competitive organization was looking to come out with a competitive service, the original Social site paid a developer $1M dollars just to stay with them and not transfer to the new company.  They set policy in place that would offer the same retention package for any Senior Developer that received a legitimate offer from their new competitor.
            Solution:

Retention – there aren’t many examples where any of the executives I work with have to start offering $1M dollar retention packages but there are different degrees of the same problem.  In times of growth or anticipated growth, companies are out there looking for the type of talent that will take them to the next level.  Understand that if you’re not finding ways to acknowledge the efforts of your staff, reward them for going above and beyond the call of duty and finding ways to empower them and make them feel heard, you will lose them. 

Find Employee Strengths – most times, if you or your managing staff hired someone, you liked them for a reason.  If you see them as an asset yet they aren’t reaching their potential, there are plenty of “strengths finder” surveys and exercises that you can take them through so that you can figure out where to move them within your company so that they can better realize their potential as well as stimulate your business and ultimately their happiness.  This will reduce the issue of keeping them on board.

Creative Hours – some companies will give time each month for employees to come up with creative new ideas, new technical code, products, service techniques, etc that they feel will help the company become better.  This can be well worth the time of the company to embrace these techniques and ideas.  Not only does it get the mind of the workers off of mundane tasks for a bit but provides them an opportunity to use their minds and stretch their potential which they like. 

Transparency – this is covered in more detail under the “Social Media” addition to this series but some food for thought, CEOs are getting smarter.  They’re finding out quickly that with the advent of Social Media and the access their staff, competition, and customers have to company data, financials, image and influence poses many potential problems.  If you’re not ready to start embracing a society of openness and honesty as well as allow those that have influence over these details of your company to work with you in a positive fashion, you’ll die from it.  This can be a huge positive tool.  You just have to know how to use it. Your competition will use these tools against you if you don’t get with the program.

Empowering Your Staff – There are plenty of ways to make employees feel as though they have control or influence over the direction of the company.  Many companies provide internal Wikis that allow employees to communicate with each other for the purpose of providing feedback, assisting each other, innovating through shared ideas, and allow them to suggest ways to make the environment, product and service better, as well as predicting future moves by your competition. Note: I can elaborate if anyone chooses on techniques used by other leaders.  A prime example is Dell computers and the techniques they have implemented over the past few years that have created great successes for other companies to follow.

These are just a  few points that I wanted to share with you from conversations in the board room and with C Level executives around the nation.  There are many other details we can get into if anyone has any questions.  Feel free to connect with me on @barretn via twitter or email me if you have any comments, additions or feedback that you'd like me to add in.  I appreciate your interest and time in reading Executive Decisions.