Hanging On To High Potentials In 6 Steps

Every organisation faces the same question with despair. At even greater risk are those organisations facing uncertainty or significant change. Talent will flee from uncertainty - and why not? It's a sellers' market.

1. Outline their future - Ensure your best people know that they're your best people and that their future with you looks strong.
   
   If you are going through a period of change, have the most senior (respected) leader personally take them aside to sketch out the organisation's future and their role in it. These messages of security must be repeated three or more times in different ways so that employees really understand they have a future and what it looks like.
   
   
2. Ask them what they want - If there are sufficient high value employees (at least 20), undertake a stay survey with them to identify what encourages them to stay, what would make them think about resigning, what would keep them there longer, and what messages they need to hear about their future.
   
   This will give you practical recommendations straight from the 'horse's mouth' so to speak, which you can immediately implement. If budgets are tight - don't forget that even a very detailed stay survey costs a fraction of replacing just one high value employee.
   
   
3. Give it to them - After step 2, you'll be able to make the right organisational changes. Separate from those big picture items the littler things managers need to do every week. They need to have a plan about how to manage each unique individual on their team. An engagement plan, if you will.
   
   The quickest and best way of doing this is where the manager has a view of their team on one chart in terms of risk and value. They can then create an engagement plan for each person, customise it and start using the plan. It takes only minutes to create a plan but it gives managers a truly unfair advantage compared to those headhunters sitting on hold.
   
   
4. Something to brag about - If there are insufficient numbers of high value employees to conduct an aggregated survey, or you want to go a step even further, provide each high value employee with a Personal Engagement Plan, where each employee is interviewed and a plan created for their learning, their preferred manager practices, knowledge transfer, the changes they'd like to see to increase their performance and how to retain their knowledge in low cost/no cost ways.
   
   You can do this internally or, for a bigger 'brag factor' and more frank and open responses, engage an external party. High potentials are the people who warrant being given external coaches, internal mentors and other signals of value.
   
   
5. Get creative - With high value employees, the key is not to rely on financial rewards alone - every employer has the same colour money, and real talent can easily choose to walk. At this point, you'll know who your high value employees are and you should have an inkling of what motivates them. 
   
   A law firm from Brisbane had a creative approach. They hired the Big Brother house a week before it went into production and opened it up to their employees. It was well-received by the employees they intended it for, gave them something to talk about and further engaged them.
   
   
6. Show them - We all respond to a belief that what we're doing is important and valued. If these really are your best people, make sure they know it, show how much you appreciate their contribution, and make it harder for them to decide to leave.

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