Credit: Oliver Le Moal
Are you experiencing any of the following in your team or organisation?
- You are losing some of your key leadership talent when it is imperative to retain them
- Leaders are leaving because they think their careers have stalled
- Leaders are expecting the organisation to make their career happen rather than owning their own careers
- Your internal leadership talent isn’t ready fast enough for vacancies meaning hefty costs to buy leaders in
If so, having a deliberate approach to supporting career development for your leaders can help, and while you may not be able to ensure this for the whole organisation, there are things you can do within your team or area of the organisation.
Firstly, why care?
I’m sure you are busy with lots of deliverables and talent retention may be one of those important focus areas that hasn’t quite made it to the top of the list. Considering what it is costing you can help bring it up in your priorities. There is a negative ripple effect to losing key talent. Not only will this be likely to have a significant negative impact on the day to day business, team members and stakeholders, but also you’ve lost the potential impact that they would have made in their next career moves in your organisation. You’ve likely invested in them significantly and now you need to replace them. For a leader on a salary of £80k it will cost you £64k to replace one. That’s a conservative estimate based on what its costs an organisation to source, recruit, onboard and train a replacement leader.. A Forbes survey conducted in September 2021 reported the turnover rate of corporate leaders had increased to an average of 18%; for an organisation with 100 leaders that means losing 18 of them in a year at a cost of at least £1million to replace them.
What can you do to help to retain your leaders?
94% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their careers; career development remains a key reason for people to leave an organisation while people who stay in their jobs express 37% more confidence that they are gaining the skills and experiences they need to develop their careers.[LinkedIn][HBR]
If you want to help the leaders in your team manage their careers so you can retain them in your organisation, the following steps can help:
- Ownership: Ensure your leaders know that they need to own their career development (not wait to be tapped on the shoulder) although you’ll support them
- Future-back: Encourage them to start with the end in mind. Have them consider a time when they’ve finished their career and are looking back at their lives. What has fulfilled them? What contribution have they made? Do they have a particular final career destination in mind?
- High level shaping: Given what they’ve discovered in their future back exploration, have them consider what might that mean previous roles need to enable? What skills need to be built? In what industries or sectors? Where? With whom? What challenging assignments might support them to build required experience?
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
- Best next move: Given where they are now, ask them what is a good next move that will enable the opportunity to meet one or two of the requirements from their high level shaping – to gain a key experience and/or learn new skills? You may have your own thoughts on this.
- Building Career Advocates: Once they have an idea of their next best move, it’s time for them to think about who might be good to speak to to understand more about that type of role? Who might be looking for talent to put into a succession plan for that type of role? How might your leader succinctly share about their career aims, what they can bring to the role, and what help they might be asking for? This requires some work by the leader to create opportunities and have themselves on the radar.
Asking these questions of the leaders in your team can go a long way to having them be more intentional about their career development.
It can also help to have a coach to support them through the different reflections and to help them prepare to put themselves across in a way that gives them the best chance of being considered for future opportunities – if this is something that one of your team members could benefit from do get in touch for an exploratory conversation.
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