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Beverly Kaye on Retaining Talent
Beverly Kaye is an author, consultant and speaker. One of her more recent works is Love 'Em or Lose 'Em: Getting Good People to Stay. David Creelman of HR.com spoke to her about HR's role in retaining talent and the interview that follows is reprinted with the permission of that organization.
DC – What do organizations have to do to retain talent?
BK – I have felt for the past 25 years that it is the job of the manager to love the talent they want to keep. The manager needs to challenge those people: notice them, appreciate them, understand them and go to bat for them.
DC – Sometimes HR feels that is their job not the manager's.
BK – It is the job of HR to lead the effort in talent management, but it is the job of the manager to owe the effort. I talk about the three-S model, the organization provides the system and structure, the manager provides the support and the employee provides the spark.
I like to ask HR people where they spend most of their energy. Is it in educating managers so they know how to support? Is it kindling the fire under the employees so they have the spark? Or are you so busy installing systems that you don't do these things?
Most often HR is spending their time on the systems and the structures. We can create beautiful systems and structures, but unless managers know how to support the spark in their people those systems don’t work.
DC – So does talent retention go awry because HR is too focused on their own systems?
BK – That is one reason. HR might think the system is all we need and the system alone will drive the behavior. Structures and systems do drive behavior but not alone. If the manager isn’t supportive, if you don’t have the high touch, talent retention isn't going to work as well as it could.
Managers need to know that loving your talent doesn’t mean hand-holding. It doesn’t mean doing someone's work for them. It means providing support. Managers can offer that support in low cost or no cost ways.
DC – How do you get managers to treat staff differently?
BK – The first step is education. A manager who has had no role models, who has only worked for tough managers and has had no training can't know what to do.
It's tough these days because mangers are working managers, not just people managers. They have tasks to perform and people to manage and are incredibly busy. So to get managers to treat staff differently, HR needs to make it easy for them to deal with the people end. If we don’t give them some prescription, or tip sheets, they are going to shy away from dealing with people. This is especially true for the more technical managers for whom the high touch stuff is hard.
DC – To our HR audience you are probably preaching to the converted. How do managers respond to your message?
BK – My experience is that managers are not resistant to the message “Care about your people”. I have done this for twenty-five years around the world and I find that when managers resist taking care of their people it is because they don’t know how to do it. They fear if they try, it may only put them deeper in the hole. They would rather not risk getting themselves into some kind of Pandora’s box, so they don't change their management style.
This is why my whole practice centers on giving managers practical tools that make the job of getting to know their talent easier. I try to make the process and tools delightfully engaging, deceptively simple and deliberately flexible.
DC – Have you noticed any change in the past year on companies' attitudes to retention?
BK – Yes. When Love 'Em or Lose 'Em came out it was the height of the talent war and managers were desperately asking, "How do we keep people?" Now that the talent war has subsided, too many HR leaders are relaxing. Managers are saying retention is no big deal. In fact, we are getting rid of people. When I hear that I think, "Watch out!" because the minute the economy changes, and it will, anyone unhappy in your organization is going to jump. The war for talent is going to be bigger and tougher then it ever was. All you have to do is look at the demographics to see how tough it is going to be.
This is the time to step up your support of talent, caring about talent and nurturing talent. This is the time when you want to whisper in the ear of those you don’t want to lose.
DC – You’ve been looking at talent issues for a long time. How have things changed over the last two-and-a-half decades?
BK – From an HR standpoint, we have become more sophisticated and smarter about the myriad of ways to deliver the knowledge managers need to manage better. However, if you go back to basics it is not new. If you think about it, Douglas McGregor talked about Theory X and Theory Y in the 1940s. Frederick Herzberg spoke about how pay was merely the hygiene factor. They were all saying it is more than pay that makes people stay. It is more than pay that turns a person on. It is more than pay that gets a person to love their job. In some ways we haven’t moved a lot because we are issuing the same message.
DC – We've focused on the role of the HR professional and manager. What is the role of the employees in keeping themselves "sparked?"
BK – That's the subject of my next book, Love it Don’t Leave It, 26 Ways To Get What You Want At Work. Employees do have a role in their own satisfaction. I tell people not to sit in a job they are not satisfied with. But, you may find that the grass isn’t greener elsewhere when you learn how to make it green right where you are.
DC – Any closing remarks for HR Managers?
BK – In a world that is as crazed and busy as ours is, where there is so much pressure on managers to do more with less, HR needs to give managers what they need in bite-sized pieces.
At the same time, we need to hold managers accountable for retaining their talent. We need to invent systems that hold mangers as accountable for their human capital as they do for budget.
David Creelman is Chief of Content and Research at HR.com. He has ten years experience working for international consultancies both in North America and Asia. David also taught "Rewards and Performance Measures" for the MBA program of the University of Malaya.
He loves travelling and has been to forty countries, the highlights being Vietnam, Tunisia, France, Kenya, Romania, Syria and Myanmar. Prior to working in HR, David worked in Finance and IT in Canada and the UK.
He has a MBA and a Hons B.Sc. in Biochemistry and Chemistry. He retains a strong interest in science, the humanities and social sciences.
Click here if you'd like a printable copy of this interview in Word document format |
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