Developing Your Best Employees Can Help Win the War for Talent

Is your company taking the right steps to retain and nurture your top performers?

As your company grows, making sure it has the right talent is essential for continued success. However, that doesn’t just mean hiring good people. It also means identifying the star players on your team, adapting them to the right roles – or the roles to them – and making sure they’re growing alongside your business.

Promoting from within vs. hiring from the outside

A common debate in fast-growing organizations is whether to promote from within or to hire individuals from the outside. There is no one ‘right’ decision – only the one that works for your specific situation. In the end, you want the best person for the job, whether that person has worked for you for 10 years or you’ve never met them before.

If your team is lacking someone with a highly specific skill set or experience that you’ll need quickly, it can definitely pay to hire from the outside. Nevertheless, it may be a good idea to give current employees a shot at a position. While there is no hard and fast formula for choosing to develop a current employee into a role vs. hiring externally, these are the basic criteria:

•  Does the position require highly-specialized skills that can’t be learned efficiently? For example, the need for a programmer who knows a specific coding language may require a new hire, if no one on your team has the education.

•  Does the position require general skills that are transferable, naturally present, or feasibly adaptable from someone already in your organization? Using the programmer example above: An excellent leader (or an individual with great potential) could work well managing a team of programmers if the candidate’s project management and leadership skills are on point.

Promoting or adapting from within is a four-step process:

1. You must recognize the need to train and nurture from within, and identify the right candidate(s).

2. You should understand that doing so is a long-term investment that will require active mentorship.

3. You must measure results through clear benchmarks and goals.

4. To maximize the investment in an employee, you should consider how a successful outcome can yield long-term benefits; essentially, how you can use good managers to create stronger training and development that in turn develops a new set of leaders.

Avoid ‘The Peter Principle’ – promoting people to the highest level of their incompetence

In 1969, educator Laurence J. Peter observed that individuals in many businesses were not promoted for their aptitude for the new position; instead, they were elevated because of their ability to do their last job. Peter theorized that each person in an organization gets promoted to “the highest level of their incompetence.” Workers do jobs they are good at until they reach one they are no longer suited for – and they either stall in that position or fail and move on to another organization.

For example, when the best salesperson in a company is tapped to become a sales manager, they’re often promoted because of their ability to sell, not their managerial acumen. And if a new sales manager doesn’t work in the new position, it creates two problems that directly impact the company’s performance: There is now a mediocre manager, plus a sales team that no longer has its best salesperson.

To avoid becoming a textbook example of the Peter Principle, you’ll want to make sure that the people you promote can succeed in the new position – plus have them commit to developing their skills – and not simply base the choice on positive but wholly unrelated performance.

When reducing staff, don’t simply keep people who automatically fit the specific position you need – look at hard workers and natural talents, too

Being smart about talent selection isn’t just important when your company is expanding – it’s also crucial in tougher times when it’s necessary to reduce staff. One of the biggest mistakes made by businesses of all sizes involves laying off great employees who don’t automatically fit into a core position. Just because a certain job is expendable doesn’t necessarily mean that the employee who does it is.

For example, if a business owner has three employees but only can afford to keep two, he or she might automatically eliminate the person whose position isn’t necessary – even if that individual is really the firm’s most valuable player. It often makes more sense to restructure the positions to keep a top performer. In the end, it’s worth trying to find a job for someone amazing, and companies who let talent walk out the door rather than reinvent themselves are often making a critical mistake. It’s too difficult to find talent.

Proper training, planning, and long-term thinking can help you develop a talented workforce

When it comes to making sure your company has the right talent, winging it almost never works. Instead, you’ll need to develop a long-term plan that truly assesses your company’s needs and devises smart ways to address them. Part of this strategy involves recognizing when it pays to invest in and grow your best employees into vital positions.

While you might not see the rewards overnight – and it certainly takes some work – keeping star players usually yields exponential benefits over time.

To learn more about how to strategically manage your workforce, reduce risk, improve worker satisfaction at your company, and make ROI-based human resources decisions, contact Karp HR Solutions today for a free consultation.