We constantly talk about the need to improve HR processes to attract, develop and retain talent and how it’s important to coach leaders on keeping their team members engaged in order to avoid high attrition rates. Somehow we often forget that it’s equally important to make sure leaders themselves are sufficiently engaged to stay on with the company.
Now retaining a leader is significantly harder compared to retaining a high potential or even a regular employee. Just ask any HR practitioner. What works for a typical talent might not necessarily work for a leader. Why? The difference lies in the set of concerns both individuals would have. A leader oversees strategic business issues, finds ways to improve results and costs low, all while keeping top management and team members happy. A star performer simply concentrates on, well, preventing his or her performance from dipping.
Everyone, regardless of which career ladder rung they are currently on, is usually excited during the first few months of starting a new job. You enjoy waking up early, going to work, and getting a feel for your new responsibilities. You get an adrenaline rush whenever you meet a target set by your boss.
But when the company starts going towards a direction different from yours or what you expect, you start having doubts about your fit to the business function. A senior HR practitioner has been very honest with his global HR boss that he is looking to leave the company soon. As its regional HR director for both Asia and Middle East regions, he feels there is nothing more he can accomplish for the power company. Or rather, he feels there is so much more he can achieve but he is still nowhere nearer to the goals he had envisioned after working there for close to two years.
It isn’t always about the money when it comes to retaining a leader, he says. It isn’t as simple as asking “How’s your day?” and “How are you coping with your work?” once in a while. It’s about the job satisfaction, the things leaders can possibly achieve for their organisation.
In the end, the questions HR should ask when retaining leaders: What keeps you motivated in your job? What are your priorities? What is the underlying factor which would persuade you to stay on in your job?
Laying low for greener pastures
But first up, should HR expect any challenges in retaining senior leaders, especially with the anticipated economic recovery? The seemingly innocuous question drew laughter from George Hallenbeck, director of intellectual property development for Korn/Ferry International’s leadership and talent consulting division. Even though global voluntary turnover rates have dropped to significant lows with everyone laying low and waiting for the economy to pick up, he finds it hard to make any predictions.
“Certainly, there are companies recognising that potential risk and are trying to do things right now to engage individuals so they are content to stay once things begin to pick up,” says Hallenbeck.
But fact is it could be anyone leaving, not just the C-suite. Even he acknowledges as much. “I have been hearing anecdotally that people around the region are particularly concerned about the senior manager, director ranks – midcareer people who are demographically thinly sliced out of the population.”
Hallenbeck’s colleague Gupta Pushp, though, isn’t surprised at this growing concern CEOs and HR professionals have been discussing around networking events. At a recent CEO forum organised by the consultancy firm, the senior executives present admitted frankly to him that this has been a fear they have been living under. “Once the economy starts ticking, senior and mid-level executives would start leaving,” says the managing principal for Korn/Ferry International’s leadership and talent consulting division in Asia. “It could very well be a phenomenon they might have to go through over the next few months.”
As far as Pushp is concerned, when companies go into survival mode during a financial crisis, they instinctively take their eyes off the ball on areas like senior talent development, general engagement and communication. But with the economy poised to recover, leaders are asking: What is our new business strategy? Should we continue to cut resources? When do we start growing? How are we getting back market share? When do we increase budgets? How do we hire more people?
The lack of consistent messages from the organisation now, explains Pushp, will only cause plenty of confusion and dissatisfaction in the senior leadership team. That’s when the disgruntlement begins.
The right engagement
Obviously, the first step to preventing leaders in your organisation from developing itchy feet is always hiring the right ones from the start. Or at least reduce the high probability of hiring an unsuitable candidate with good recruitment practices. “That’s the caveat that you put in place because you just can’t hire everyone,” says Carmen Wee, vice president of human resources for Invensys Operations Management Asia Pacific and Middle East. “You must make sure there is a culture fit.”
Use well-trained interviewers, good referrals, reference checks and introduce personality, literacy, numeracy tests to screen job candidates very carefully. “All of that helps to screen out a bunch of people who have a high chance of working is ialways hiring the right ones from the start. Or at least reduce the high probability of hiring an unsuitable candidate with good recruitment practices. “That’s the caveat that you put in place because you just can’t hire everyone,” says Carmen Wee, vice president of human resources for Invensys Operations Management Asia Pacific and Middle East. “You must make sure there is a culture fit.”
Use well-trained interviewers, good referrals, reference checks and introduce personality, literacy, numeracy tests to screen job candidates very carefully. “All of that helps to screen out a bunch of people who have a high chance of working out in your company,” she explains. But the harsh reality is some leaders would still leave even after a company has trained and invested in them because the career path mapped out for them may no longer meet their personal goals and requirements.
The current crop of engineers who have been with Invensys for the last 10 to 15 years may well be the last of its generation in the workplace. Without an accelerated career path, retaining new leaders might be a hard task for Wee and her HR team. “In the past, it may have taken them 10 years to become a manager, but these people are not going to wait for 10 years,” she says. “They want to wait at most three to five years.”
Besides providing lateral moves to the different functions within Invensys and regional assignments every two to three years, Wee has placed young leaders in a two-year mentorship programme. “We assign them mentors who meet them every week so they are stuck with their mentors,” she says. “Through that, they are very bonded to the company and the team because they sat in the classroom and work together on projects together for two years.” But a retention strategy is more than giving leaders new skills and development.
Tricks of the trade
The CEOs, surveyed by Korn/Ferry, also talked about the fact that they need to be getting back to fundamentals. That is, constant communication from the top right through to the bottom within the organisation. “One of the things CEOs talked about in Asia is you just can’t repeat once and hope that everybody got the message, says Pushp. “You’ve got to reinforce the message again and again.”
Other than communication and consistency, there are perhaps two vital principles HR should nail to their office walls when engaging leaders. One, align leaders to the organisation’s strategy. Two, establish a dialogue with senior leaders whereby HR is in tune with the organisational direction. In fact, Hallenbeck believes HR should even have a seat at table when the organisation is forming the business strategy so it has the ability to cascade that knowledge and churn out a good support strategy.
HR needs to ask itself what leaders need to excel at individually and as a team within the company. To name a few, good process management, conflict management, peer relationships, strategic agility, organisational perspective. “There has to be a clear line of sight from the strategy down to what individuals need to be good at,” says Hallenbeck.
Next, integration, says Hallenbeck. Integrate end-to-end employee propositions to HR talent processes such as strategic workforce planning, to talent acquisitions, to onboarding to leadership assessment, performance management, succession planning and career development. But make sure there is a fundamental basis in each of the leadership competency so the processes become a connecting thread. “It gives HR the ability to say what we are doing is really helping drive and support the strategy versus lagging outside the picture.”
Those who have managed just that have not only created a tightly knitted senior management team but they are also looking to build a second generation of leaders after the crisis. This is going to be a top priority for these CEOs, says Pushp, because the gap between the head of the house and the organisation is “just too big” to ensure long-term business continuity.
“In good times, even if you have less than world-class abilities, the market conditions and demand will carry you through,” says Pushp. “In a crisis, when you don’t have a top notch second level leadership team who have seen a crisis before, you can’t navigate through.” Simply because they lack the skills and proper experience so it’s time to start from scratch.
Rallying the leaders
“You have to be very creative,” says Wee. “You have to develop themes and programmes that engage the hearts and minds of the people.”
Just as well, Invensys’ HR team is in the midst of developing a rallying statement that would partner its business values of sustainability, profitability and growth. This is the sort of discussion HR needs to have with the business leaders if they want to engage not just leaders, but the entire employee population. It’s about engaging people using the corporate themes and yet staying relevant to the business. Wee says, “What is the tagline to basically encapsulate the HR engagement strategy in a manner that employees can understand? Is it ‘One theme, one family’? Is it ‘The future is ours’?”
A good rallying call can be a very effective conduit of reaching out to the employees and understanding the pulse of the company, explains Wee. Invensys recently developed a global employee portal called I-Grow, which allows employees to access internet-based training as part of their development plans. This is, of course, nothing new for most multinational corporations.
But one thing which differentiates Invensys is the I-Grow appreciation classes that have been conducted in Asia Pacific and the Middle East regions. It’s a hands-on introduction course to the portal, complete with games and music, which makes employees feel the company wants to “learn and grow together” with them. Compare the class to sending a mass impersonal email with a link to the portal and you suddenly realise why face-to-face interaction is inherently valued by both HR and the population they want to engage.
Weighing the scales
But how do you balance a company’s long-term investment into talent retention programmes when younger leaders have become more susceptible to job-hopping? After all, they have arguably a different mentality about holding onto a job. It doesn’t make sense for a company to put in large investments in improving a leader’s competencies when there’s a possibility he or she might leave in a couple of years. Or does it?
Different companies look at talent differently, Wee admits. But it isn’t wise for a company to halt its investments in talent management simply because it perceives its leaders, especially the younger ones, as employees who would eventually leave. “You may deprive yourself of a very important group of people because there are a lot of aging societies in Asia.”
In Asia itself, there have been plenty of precocious young leaders streaming out of fast growing economies like China and India or even emerging markets such as Philippines and Vietnam. “They form the middle class [talent] with good language ability, good education and they are very globally-connected because of their access to technology,” says Wee. “You have to think about leveraging these employees in the context of your business needs more than just hiring experienced and older people.”
Within Invensys’ space in engineering and technology, the automation and information technologies provider has hired plenty of young engineers across Asia. They are “very well-trained, sophisticated and very relevant for our industries”, explains Wee. Otherwise, it isn’t sustainable for the company’s growth if HR is solely focused on today, and not thinking about the future. “The younger people you hire will form the tomorrows for you,” says Wee. “As long as you have that inflow, that creates more choices for you and that outflow, which refreshes your talent, keeps the company going.”
What’s next?
When you look at companies that survived the downturn and are regaining their profitable levels, one thing remains consistent. Their talent management practices. Which is why the introspection from surveys of HR professionals hasn’t changed at the start of the year. If leaders work for an organisation that recognises and embraces talent the right way, they are hardly likely to question their job fit and satisfaction levels at work. “Money isn’t a strong driver for these people,” says Hallenbeck.
“You need to engage the hearts – the passion and the challenge,” says Wee. Over time, HR needs to give leaders a strong personal identity of who they are and how their individuality is connected to the company’s identity. This is why the next level of engagement platform Wee has in mind is from the corporate social responsibility (CSR) angle. “One of the things I want to do over time is mobilise this group of people to do some community-related stuff because we are in the sustainability business,” she says. “You need to plug them into the wider community, beyond their daily concerns of having time and more money.”
In other words, retaining a leader successfully would involve a combination of providing challenging assignments, building relationships, coaching them to discover who they are. “You need to offer them something other companies cannot offer,” says Wee.
