Why Do Team Members Stay?
This relationship might be the biggest indicator of whether your best people stay, and you give the person in charge of this relationship almost no training on how to manage it effectively.
Please, make it make sense.
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Worth Reading – The trap of being promoted from within
When you get the title, people will bring you things and hand off responsibility to things that you didn’t know existed. Even though you were sitting right there, in the team that you now lead, you don’t know how many things the previous person in that chair never bothered to tell you about, or the relationships across other teams that made their life easier that you need to build. Many of those things didn’t just happen; effort went into knowing what to do and who to talk to.
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Worth Reading – Good Leaders Presume Team Members Feel Undervalued and Underappreciated
It’s a difficult thing, in the busy work world we all live in, to make sure your people are looked after and appreciated. It’s very easy to take them for granted because you trust them to do their work. I’m not saying you should micromanage them, but showing an interest in them and their work would help them feel like part of the team. Letting other things get in the way creates an issue. One that may lead your best performers to leave for a place where they feel more appreciated.
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Create Certainty Where You Can
Like it or not, your team is dealing with a ridiculous amount of uncertainty in and out of the office. Most of it is beyond our control. When we have the opportunity to create less of it, we should do so. We have the opportunity to make a difference for our team, as human beings, just by communicating and setting clear expectations. Why wouldn’t we?
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Worth Reading – When You’re Stuck on “Help Wanted”
I feel like we learned this in Econ 101, right? It’s a simple supply-and-demand curve. If you can’t buy the supply at the price you are offering, you need to raise it. Yet, the article goes on to talk about all the reasons why this isn’t happening, and they aren’t what you’d expect. It’s not just small shops that lack the resources to conduct salary research; it’s also very large, growing companies that don’t want to adjust the salaries of currently underpaid employees or are hesitant to commit to higher salaries long-term, etc.
In the end, though, those concerns are your problem, not the candidates.
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Worth Reading – Nobody Is Coming to Save Your Career
It doesn’t take much to stand out as a manager when no one is taking the time to even ask about the career goals of the people who report to you. The organization probably isn’t going to provide much in the way of talent development budget, but if you can just show you care and provide some mentorship, you’ll be outdoing 90% of the managers out there.
