Ensure You Retain Top Talent
Are you retaining your top talent?
Follow our top three recommendations:
Deliver a Compelling Vision: Articulate a clear vision that aligns your team around a meaningful purpose, focusing on solving customer pain points.
Leverage the Power of Managers: Equip managers to enhance collaboration and trust, fostering an inclusive environment where employees can contribute their best work.
Show You Care and Mean It: Go beyond pay and invest in hyper-personalized development for your team members, showing you care about them and want them to grow.
Investing in developing managers and team members is crucial to achieving a significant retention impact.
Based on years of behavioral research and talent development experience, our most important advice is about the “how.”
Focus on Business Impact First
Sounds simple, right? But what does this actually entail?
Let’s examine the traditional model. With good intentions, you may decide that all managers must enhance their leadership skills to improve employee experience and increase retention. You establish a curriculum focused on leadership competencies, identify which individuals need to develop specific skills, organize workshops, and invite experts to provide training.
What often happens? You might achieve a 60-90% attendance rate at your workshops, engage managers during the sessions, implement case studies and role-playing activities, and encourage them to apply these skills in their daily work. However, the reality is that few actually put these techniques into practice, resulting in only slight improvements in retention over time. While you may receive positive feedback about the curriculum and workshops, the inevitable question arises: “So what?”
The method of upskilling is just as crucial as the content itself. It’s imperative that your training connects directly to specific leadership outcomes and business impacts. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Our Recommendation
Stop merely pushing skills or competencies. Instead, concentrate on the business impact—the manager’s challenges or opportunities. For instance, a manager might say,
- “My team has missed several deadlines, and I know they feel badly about it. I am not sure what to do to improve our ability to deliver“
- “I stepped into this role, and the existing team is extremely competitive and frankly unwilling to work together. We have to innovate on our offering, but without better collaboration, we won’t deliver what the customers want. What can I do?“
Since each challenge is unique, deliver a hyper-personalized upskilling experience tailored to address that specific issue. Ultimately, you can measure the results:
- “We met our last three deadlines!“
- “We came up with two viable solution concepts that we are moving forward with!“
And, yes, the manager has also learned to be a more effective leader in the process.
Learning & Development is often seen as discretionary. The answer? Prioritize business impact.
“For us, this represented the trifecta of retention! Employees are more engaged and staying, managers are experiencing less burnout, and productivity is increasing.”
MEET Jack: Newly promoted, Chief HR Officer, 26 years experience
“We have been losing too many employees to our competitors, and even if we dive in at the last minute to offer more money, some of our best employees still leave. This situation is starting to impact our ability to meet customer expectations. We need to rethink our approach to talent and create an environment where our employees feel valued and engaged. What can we do?”
Jack’s approach to leadership is a masterclass in creating a purposeful and engaged workforce. Working with the CEO and senior leadership, they developed a compelling company vision and a communication plan that connects all team members to it.
His focus on personalized on-the-job training for managers sets a new standard in leadership development. Partnering with Gotara and leveraging their neuroscience-based approach, he now upskills managers to foster a more empathetic culture, and invests in the development of high-potential talent so they feel more valued and see clear growth opportunities.
The results? Eight weeks after enrolling in the upskilling program, managers and individual contributors started to change behaviors and create more business impact. And after approximately one year, attrition went from 26% to 8%.
Gotara Works
UP TO97%
of participants retained
UP TO76%
of participants had their careers accelerated within the 1st year
94%
of participants rate a 20-80% improvement on specific skills
94%
of participants made Moderate to Significant advancements towards their goal
Ready to transform your approach to talent growth and retention?
