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You know that feeling when a valued team member asks for a meeting with you and starts by letting you know they are handing in their notice? That’s a feeling you don’t want to repeat too often. What can you do in the way that you lead your team and shape it’s micro-climate to avoid it? I’ll share some tips below.
Do you have an extended team? One in which you lead managers who themselves lead their own team members? If you do, you’ll know that is is even more of a headache when one of your team leads resigns and there is no one to step into their shoes.
The likelihood is another team member gets overloaded as they temporarily take on that team too … or the managerless team members all role up to you and you are caught between wanting to support them but not having the time to do so…. And meanwhile you risk disengaged sub team members, lower performance, and negative client/customer impact.
Wouldn’t it be great to firstly not have them resign at all (or reduce the probability significantly) and secondly, should it happen, to have a ready successor for that team leader role?
How can you lead to give that a greater chance of happening?
Connect team members to your organisation emotionally
One of the key reasons employees leave an organisation is for better career prospects. If you can help them to see how they can meet their career needs at your organisation, but more than that how their work will enable them to make a difference that matters to them in your organisation, this is less likely to happen. Get to know team members and, where they lead their own teams, ensure that they, in turn, know their team members. Some key questions that can help here include:
- What do they want from their career?
- What do they see as their purpose (the difference that they want to make)?
- How can that purpose be fulfilled within your organisation in future roles?
- How does their current role take them towards that?.
Create the expectation that high performance for team leads includes them developing their successors
While you’d hope your team leads naturally want to develop their team members, even if that’s not their natural inclination, this expectation focuses their minds on it. It also helps to create a team culture more widely of growth and career development.
Work with your team leads so that you, and they, can all ‘talk talent’
This means that they are able to discuss their team members with you, and with their peers, objectively – explaining both their strength areas and development areas, but even more importantly, knowing enough about them to talk to their career aspirations – what they’d like to achieve in their careers, what difference they want to make, as well as any parameters that need to be considered such as limited mobility for the next year but then open to moves. Of course, this means that they need to know their team members.
Lead by example – who are you most likely successor options?
If you want your team leads to do the above, show them how important it is to you by doing it with them in relation to their own careers. Don’t make it an afterthought but a key part of your role. Help them define their career development plans that give them experiences and growth to meet their aspirations and do what you can to enable that within their current roles. Check in regularly and consistently to give support and encouragement.
While other factors sometimes come into play (you may not be able to retain someone who needs to move geographically when their partner gets a new role for example), doing the above and focusing on what you can influence and control can go a long way to holding onto your talent.
What else would you recommend?
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