Podcast Ep 80 | How to Retain Your Top Talent

With a war for tal­ent being expe­ri­enced world­wide at the moment, employ­ers are not only find­ing it hard to find new peo­ple, it can also be very chal­leng­ing to retain your exist­ing people.

This week Kevin and Brad dig deep into this chal­leng­ing issue, and cov­er 7 key steps you can take to give you the best chance of retain­ing your A‑players.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Brad Giles 00:13

Wel­come to the growth whis­pers where every­thing that we talk about is build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies, not short com­pa­nies that last all com­pa­nies that last a short time, not com­pa­nies that are mediocre, not com­pa­nies that peo­ple are in love with endur­ing great com­pa­nies. Today, as always, I’m joined by my co host, Kevin Lawrence, Kevin. Hel­lo, and how are you doing today?

Kevin Lawrence 00:36

I’m doing great, Brad. Look­ing for­ward to record­ing an episode we haven’t record­ed over the last cou­ple of weeks. So it’s nice to be back at it and have a chance for you and it reconnect

Brad Giles 00:46

Indeed. Yes, we have had a cou­ple of weeks, we actu­al­ly had a bit of a hol­i­day or went up to a place called Dar­win, which you may know from some­thing called the movie with Paul Hogan called Croc­o­dile Dundee. So in the Dar­win riv­er the most amaz­ing step from that the in the Dar­win by around the city. Last year, they took 343 croc­o­diles mean eat­ing croc­o­diles out of the bay, just last year.

Kevin Lawrence 01:18

Wow. Did you run? Did you do any croc­o­dile wrestling while you were there?

Brad Giles 01:24

No. Peo­ple don’t often sur­vive that. And so No, no, we saw quite a few of them. But def­i­nite­ly, def­i­nite­ly do not want to be involved in crop at home lis­ten­ing. Yeah, so as always, we like to talk about a word of the day. So Kevin, tell me what is your word of the day or phrase,

Kevin Lawrence 01:44

my mind is recov­ery. And, you know, it’s very inter­est­ing that I’ve had, it’s been very, very busy the first part of the sea­son since the sum­mer or since our sum­mer, you know, Sep­tem­ber going into Octo­ber, and it’s been incred­i­bly busy, but a very, very busy time. And I’m just in that peri­od where I’m kind of catch­ing my breath. You know, I kind of think of myself in the work we do. Like, like, I’m an elite ath­lete. I’m not an either elite ath­lete, like I’m not a marathon run­ner or some­thing. But that we work real­ly in Sprint­’s we work real­ly hard dur­ing peri­ods of time. And then we get a recov­ery peri­od. So fol­low­ing my own advice from my book, your oxy­gen mask, first, know my resilience rit­u­als and a bit of a recov­ery peri­od over the next cou­ple of weeks still work­ing, but just not as intense­ly. So recov­ery time is is is my theme or my word of today.

Brad Giles 02:35

Awe­some, awe­some. You, mine is reset, not too dis­sim­i­lar. Because I have had a few days Well, a week and a half off. So yeah, it’s good to reset. And, you know, every­body needs to do that. We know that glob­al­ly, in the busi­ness world, this chal­lenges around men­tal health at the moment because of the pan­dem­ic. So it’s real­ly just around reset, and the good that it can do. So we all have that. What are we talk­ing about today?

Kevin Lawrence 03:05

Or we’re mak­ing sure that we don’t have to recov­er for reset­ting too many key peo­ple in key posi­tions. Like, oh, we have that one togeth­er, right? That’s mag­ic. It was mag­ic off the cuff. But basi­cal­ly, we’re talk­ing about how do you make sure you retain your key peo­ple, and don’t have to go through the pain of replac­ing them, and reset­ting the whole process in your com­pa­ny. And that’s, that’s not fun. You know, it’s some­thing that we’ve been talk­ing about with a lot of CEOs and execs over the last while there’s this talk about the greater res­ig­na­tion. You know, and, you know, it kind of reminds me of y2k, when there was all this hype about all the com­put­ers in the world are going to shut down and I don’t know whether it’s true or not, I know there’s peo­ple that held on to their jobs dur­ing COVID that might be think­ing about mov­ing now. And it might be some deferred move­ment. But whether there is oth­er isn’t, who knows. I don’t want to play into you know, Face­book news and, and hype. But what we know is it’s a tight job mar­ket no mat­ter what, yes. And replac­ing peo­ple no mat­ter what is as chal­leng­ing as it gets. Yeah. Or we’re aware of that it gets. And so the oth­er piece that you know, they’re real­ly pas­sion­ate about is you’ll los­ing an A play­er or a high per­form­ing employ­ee is a is the cinnabar sins is one of the worst things that can hap­pen as a man­ag­er, los­ing your great peo­ple, espe­cial­ly if you weren’t aware of it, or proac­tive­ly doing things to help it so yeah, today we’re talk­ing about retain­ing your top tal­ent. Yeah,

Brad Giles 04:43

look, absolute­ly. It makes for a great head­line that peo­ple might click to talk about that kind of res­ig­na­tion stuff. But the real­i­ty is, is that this skills short­ages is a real chal­lenge for every­body around the world. And that means that Com­peti­tors or peo­ple who want to hire peo­ple may want to pay more or offer more or do dif­fer­ent things. So yeah, it is yes, for that rea­son alone, it’s an impor­tant sub­ject for us to talk about. So yeah, today we’re talk­ing about how to retain your top tal­ent, what you can, here’s

Kevin Lawrence 05:19

some of the things that we’re hear­ing around the world and like your­self, I work with peo­ple around the world in Aus­tralia, and India and Mid­dle East and US and Cana­da and oth­er Asia. And the same thing we’re hear­ing we’re hear­ing peo­ple offer­ing high­er wages, we’re hear­ing about, you know, sign­ing bonus­es or things like that, we’re hear­ing about more active recruit­ment, I don’t know if it actu­al­ly is more active, but, you know, more active recruit­ment, and there’s just a lot of talk about it, and we’re hear­ing that this mar­ket, the rent, it could be tight for quite a while. Before, it’s, you know, so it’s, it’s always hard, it just seems to be a lit­tle bit hard­er. So now we’re real­ly want­i­ng to stay with their atten­tion, just in case, you don’t believe how impor­tant you know, it is, you know, from just an income state­ment point of view, nev­er­mind a knowl­edge loss or stuff, you know, the costs of replac­ing keep you it’s expen­sive, yeah, you don’t want when you’re when you do the ener­gy to get, find, recruit the right per­son. And, and, and, and make sure you do prop­er select­ing, when we, when we use top grad­ing with most of our clients all the time, you know, and the ener­gy and the time and the orga­ni­za­tion­al ener­gy and then get­ting them on board and every­thing else, it’s a lot. And if you look at the cal­cu­la­tors of what it cost to replace some­one, you know, it can be astro­nom­i­cal, much more than you would nor­mal­ly think off the top of your head,

Brad Giles 06:48

oh, and look at what real­ly is in this, there’s two dif­fer­ent parts to the cost. The first is the direct cost. And then there’s the kind of all inclu­sive cost. And so the direct costs could be just sim­ply the cost to hire, it could be, oh, we need to put an ad out or we need to pay a recruiter. But then there’s this the full the ful­ly includ­ed cost. And that’s what the real kind of the real cost is, and obvi­ous­ly sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er. And like you, you know, I’m an advo­cate for top grad­ing and the huge body of evi­dence that that has been cre­at­ed there around that. And, and they’re say­ing that depend­ing on the role, it kind of goes from one to 1.5 times the per­son­’s salary up to 15 times the per­son­’s salary for an executive.

Kevin Lawrence 07:44

And you see, some­times when you have the wrong per­son, the cost, the actu­al dol­lar cost of the errors, or some­times it’s a fraud, some­times it’s los­ing oth­er good peo­ple. And then you see the pos­i­tive impact of the right per­son. Yeah, and now they reduce costs, and they retain good peo­ple and make bet­ter deci­sions. So the swing is mas­sive, I have seen exam­ples where we can count $10 mil­lion, for the wrong per­son in a roll eas­i­ly. It’s hard­er to count the upside when they improve it unless they’re maybe a CEO, but what­ev­er it is, it’s mas­sive. And that, you know, we just don’t want to com­mit that car­di­nal sin of los­ing your absolute best peo­ple. So you know, if you haven’t had time to think of what you’re not sure, and I know this is prob­a­bly preach­ing to the choir, as we would call it. It’s mas­sive­ly expen­sive. And if you want to watch me in meet­ings get fired up. When I hear that play­ers have left, I want to know what’s going on. Right? I even have my team or my client will hire some­one on my team to go do the exit inter­view. Because I want the truth. I don’t want what they’re going to tell HR because some­times HR can get the old goods. Yeah, some­times they’re afraid to tell some­one in the com­pa­ny the full good, I want to know, because if we’re going to just a burned, los­ing a good per­son, and some­where between a cou­ple 100 and a cou­ple, a cou­ple 100 grand and a cou­ple mil­lion dol­lars, I want to get our mon­ey’s worth from it. So let’s, we’re try­ing to pre­vent you from that painful expe­ri­ence and in the work that we do have spent a lot of time and ener­gy on retain­ing key peo­ple in com­pa­nies. And it’s not that hard. You just got to put the time and ener­gy into it. And that is our first point today. You have to put the same time and ener­gy to retain­ing your top peo­ple as you do is to retain­ing the rev­enue of your top cus­tomers. We have account man­age­ment sys­tems and things that we do to to keep our top cus­tomers hap­py and do to expand the busi­ness or keep the busi­ness or keep the com­pe­ti­tion out of the busi­ness. We don’t do that with peo­ple almost every­where. Even HR depart­ments are so busy hir­ing and mak­ing sure every­one’s doing their damn per­for­mance. reviews and deal­ing with employ­ees employ­ee prob­lems, that they often don’t have the time to do it, they’re there, they’re not anoth­er would­n’t want to, they just don’t have the time or the ener­gy to. So we’ve got to make sure that the orga­ni­za­tion is ded­i­cat­ing the ener­gy to retain­ing and keep­ing our employ­ees engaged.

Brad Giles 10:17

Yeah. Because the cost of los­ing an A play­er employ­er a, it could be, it could be if you can’t replace them, if they’re dif­fi­cult to replace, it could be so much more than a key account. We look at key accounts as if it’s every­thing, but in actu­al fact, when you look at the p&l, and you think about the impact that the top per­former could have, yeah, it’s, it’s absolute­ly worth the effort to put in to try to retain these peo­ple. So So are you putting any effort into the actu­al reten­tion rel­a­tive to sales, or at all effect?

Kevin Lawrence 10:59

And that’s you the CEO, or the exec­u­tive or the man­ag­er, not you, the head of HR, head of HR HR per­son as well, but you the actu­al man­ag­er of those peo­ple? Or have your peo­ples peo­ple, you know, like, like, yeah, so so once you’ve com­mit­ted that, you’re going to put the time and ener­gy into it, we got a whole bunch of good ideas that we have seen, that will make a difference

Brad Giles 11:27

a cou­ple of months ago. So there are a cou­ple of months ago, I had an own­er of a busi­ness call me up because his CEO had resigned, and he went to work for or he tak­en a job with a com­peti­tor, but was still work­ing out his time. And he said, I don’t know what to do. And this per­son was clear­ly an AI play­er. He was you know, run­ning the busi­ness, essen­tial­ly by him­self. And he says I don’t want to do it’s going to be so hard to find some­one like it’s going to dam­age the cul­ture and all of that and I said, Well, have you tried to get him back? Have you tried to keep the per­son and he said yeah, I tried real­ly, real­ly hard? And I said, Well, what have you done? Oh, look, I spoke to him for like sev­er­al hours and the guy paid him he would­n’t tell me exact­ly how much but it was, you know, a shock­ing amount of mon­ey and I was like, Okay, I said so what’s going to be the cost to this busi­ness and it’s not about only the mon­ey and you and I’ve spo­ken about this before they don’t peo­ple don’t leave for mon­ey but their lead­ers think that they do and so I said well how about this? What about if you go back and say look, I’ve thought about it and you’re such a valu­able per­son to this orga­ni­za­tion. And just give him a blank con­tract like a phys­i­cal paper blank con­tract, and just say, I want you to fill in the blanks with what you need to stay here and con­tin­ue to per­form in the way that you are. And that the phys­i­cal­i­ty of that doc­u­ment made a huge dif­fer­ence in the mind­set of that per­son. And even though this per­son had he’d signed anoth­er con­tract and he did­n’t want to go back in His Word with this oth­er com­pa­ny he did he turned around he put in there what he want­ed and he stayed and now this guy because it’s been a few months is actu­al­ly per­form­ing bet­ter than he has before is felt hon­ored and

Kevin Lawrence 13:21

impor­tant to that stuff. Yeah, the only thing I would say about that sto­ry is two things. One, they were deal­ing with it way too late to that’s a very dan­ger­ous strat­e­gy because then word gets out and you got a line­up of peo­ple at your door ask­ing for 30 or 40 grand more so it does work to save but there’s a down­side of it that you can get your­self in some com­pa­nies have poli­cies that once a per­son they will not bid up to keep and instead they put the ener­gy ear­ly in the process because you can cre­ate a big prob­lem even though I under­stand it you can cre­ate a big prob­lem of every­one in the word get­ting out you just have to quit and then then they’ll give you more money

Brad Giles 14:06

but and you are cor­rect them but still try still like think about what else he can do Don’t try

Kevin Lawrence 14:14

and try ide­al­ly to do it with­out cash yes unless their salary was way off mar­ket and every­thing else because then you start cre­at­ing the word that peo­ple will like some of my clients if that hap­pens they’re like thank you and you’re out because it’s they don’t want to cre­ate that cul­ture Have you got a you know, bend us over a bar­rel to get more mon­ey to stay? Yeah, for sure. And it does work because they tried so ide­al­ly you do it lat­er and some­times if it’s an absolute crit­i­cal role, some­times you might not have a choice. Yeah. And you just got to do what you do at least for a short peri­od of time. So we talked about the same ener­gy. The sec­ond thing is about real­ly know your peo­ple and know what’s going on which would tie into ear­li­er in the process. Pow­er things Going with their work, how are things going with their life and their wife or their hus­band and their kids like, no, a good leader will be very close to their peo­ple and know where they’re at. So they can help them nav­i­gate the stress­es out­side of work as well as inside work. And if you real­ly know where your peo­ple are at in their life, and what’s going on with their work, and help­ing them to find ways through it, you know, you can, you can know, you will know in advance the things that are dri­ving them crazy. And as we know, from, you know, the book, sev­en hid­den rea­sons employ­ees leave and that was back in what episode was that? Brad,

Brad Giles 15:35

I think I was 56.

Kevin Lawrence 15:39

Sev­en hid­den rea­sons employ­ee leave, and they talk about the Yo, mo 88% of man­agers are rough­ly 80 to 90% of man­agers believe employ­ees leave for more mon­ey. The truth is, from the exit inter­views, that only about 11 or 12%, lead for more mon­ey. And in many of those cas­es, there were oth­er fac­tors beyond mon­ey that made them want to leave. And they’re all most­ly emo­tion­al fac­tors. And lead­er­ship is man­ag­ing peo­ple’s emo­tions and find­ing a way to make things work for them. And if you know your peo­ple and know where they’re at, you have a much bet­ter chance of doing it.

Brad Giles 16:17

And that, I mean, that sim­ply means con­nect­ing with them look­ing for sub­tle cues that are occur­ring, find­ing the oppor­tu­ni­ty through meet­ings, you know, to touch base, and it could be as sim­ple as we’re gonna do a one word open­er for our dai­ly hud­dle, or our week­ly meet­ing or what­ev­er, lit­tle things like that. And then the one word, there are lit­tle flags and sig­nals that you can pick up on that can give you the oppor­tu­ni­ty to dig deep­er. Yeah,

Kevin Lawrence 16:47

and we’ll do a check in on a scale of zero to 10. Some­times we do it in in terms of work self and life split­ting it out for the dif­fer­ent areas. Yeah, some com­pa­nies, we talk about what’s going well at work for your­self and in life and what’s not like, just, you know, know­ing peo­ple, then you have the best posi­tion to know where they’re at and what they need. The that’s the third is an actu­al for­mal process called state inter­views. Right, instead of an exit inter­view, do that after they’ve quit, do a stay inter­view to pre­vent them from quit­ting. Yeah. And it’s just real­ly, Hey, how’s it going? Here? You know, how you feel­ing about your role? How you feel­ing about work­ing with me, your man­ag­er? You know, what’s your enjoy­ment of your role? What can we do to make this bet­ter for you? So how old are you need? You need a new print­er? Good.

Brad Giles 17:45

How’s that dif­fer­ent to a per­for­mance review?

Kevin Lawrence 17:49

It’s the oth­er way around. You’re doing a review of the orga­ni­za­tion and your­self and how you’re doing and how you, you know, how they’re feel­ing about it. It’s like, how are we doing at serv­ing your needs? ver­sus talk­ing about how you’re serv­ing the orga­ni­za­tion needs? Yeah, it’s the oth­er side of the coin. Yeah, yeah, the point of it, and most man­agers are so busy deal­ing with man­ag­ing work, they don’t take time for the peo­ple. That’s why HR depart­ments have to man­date per­for­mance reviews, and hunt peo­ple down and beat them with the stick to get it done. Because man­agers are busy. Yeah, and or they don’t pri­or­i­tize tak­ing care of their peo­ple, what­ev­er it is, we’re not here to judge that. It’s just con­scious­ly tak­ing the time to basi­cal­ly deeply under­stand their lev­el of engage­ment, and what’s going to help them to to be able to thrive in their work, and you’ll always find stuff.

Brad Giles 18:45

And that, you know, we’ve spo­ken before about the man­ag­er as a coach, the impor­tance of hav­ing the per­spec­tive that a man­ag­er isn’t there just to man­age the work as you just said, in actu­al fact, the man­ag­er is there to coach the peo­ple is their pri­ma­ry role. And coach­ing is about ask­ing the right ques­tions. So if you’re ask­ing the right ques­tions, are you going to know your peo­ple and be it’s going to help through these stay inter­views, situations?

Kevin Lawrence 19:11

Yeah, I used to do with one of my clients, I did a lot of coach­ing of their exec­u­tives of the whole exec­u­tive team. Every sin­gle one was crit­i­cal to the busi­ness, very hard to recruit, you know, high impact roles. And dur­ing the peri­od that because no one left, peo­ple were think­ing about it, but because because because we could iden­ti­fy their frus­tra­tions, many ways. My coach­ing con­ver­sa­tions had an ele­ment of a state con­ver­sa­tion in it. Yeah. And when there were frus­tra­tions, I would work with them to get them resolved, whether it was with a co work­er, a sup­pli­er or the CEO. And then we would have a plan at the end of it of what we were going to do in some of these peo­ple. I would make sure I talked to them every month, pure­ly to keep them engaged and help them deal with it was it was a lit­tle A lot of stuff going on in this com­pa­ny, we have anoth­er sit­u­a­tion where one of my team did it where they coached a dozen or 15 peo­ple, I think, because the, the VP run­ning a huge divi­sion of the com­pa­ny that he was try­ing to turn around, and that divi­sion was messy for a lot of rea­sons. He was let go. And so now they had a very crit­i­cal part of the busi­ness that was just try­ing to get its feet under it, and just come togeth­er as a team, and now their leader was gone, and oth­er exec­u­tives step­ping in, but we knew that was a big Val­ley to bridge. And so one of our team mem­bers who had been work­ing with that team on some stuff, coached every sin­gle one of them week­ly for 12 weeks. Yep. And then went down to every two weeks and went down to every once a month, as as a bridge for reten­tion. And again, last nobody. And again, if you know if you’re going to go and invest 100 grand in, in, in reten­tion, it real­ly, it’s incred­i­bly good val­ue, com­pared to the cost of los­ing just one of those peo­ple replac­ing just one of those peo­ple is in the hun­dreds of 1000s of dol­lars of cost to the busi­ness. Yeah, poten­tial­ly. And to spend a bunch of mon­ey with a coach who already had a rela­tion­ship to real­ly help them through these chal­leng­ing times. Because that’s why peo­ple leave they lose hope. And they lose faith that things are pos­si­ble and good coach­ing and, and stay inter­views can help them along the way.

Brad Giles 21:36

Indeed, indeed. And so mov­ing on to the next one, career paths, belief and pride in their career path. So where are you at in terms of your career as an employ­ee? Where a you hop­ing to go? And how does that align with the ambi­tions of the busi­ness? One of the real­ly inter­est­ing eval­u­a­tions that I’ve done with lead­er­ship teams is draw­ing an S curve in draw­ing an S curve. So you’ve, you know what an S curve looks like. And then plot­ting an indi­vid­ual against that S curve, know­ing that peo­ple don’t real­ly know too much at the bot­tom, and they achieved mas­tery at the top. But in terms of their engage­ment through the mid­dle, that’s the sweet spot. And what we want to do is to have indi­vid­u­als spend as much time as pos­si­ble in that sweet spot. Because when you achieve mas­tery, it’s fan­tas­tic. But there can be a lit­tle bit of com­pla­cen­cy, and their engage­ment can kind of drop back. So yes, being able to think where are the peo­ple in terms of their engage­ment and their career path?

Kevin Lawrence 22:51

Yeah, and one of the ways that we often keep a play­ers engaged, is mak­ing sure they have their next chal­lenges. Yeah. Now, whether it’s a chal­leng­ing project, or chang­ing of the role chal­lenges real­ly crit­i­cal for some of these peo­ple, and who would think give the peo­ple more real­ly tough work, and they’ll be hap­pi­er. But for some peo­ple, that’s the case, it’s, it’s, again, these things aren’t rock­et sci­ence, you got to put the time to and again, career path as part of that, whether it’s pro­mo­tion, types of projects, maybe it’s a new loca­tion, maybe they changed parts of the busi­ness, it does­n’t mat­ter, just, you know, keep­ing peo­ple so that they feel belief and engage­ment and where they’re going.

Brad Giles 23:35

Yeah, and there was years and years ago, I worked with a con­struc­tion com­pa­ny and they had a say­ing that the best way to keep your project man­agers who were real­ly the glue in the busi­ness was to keep them busy. So as you say, as soon as they’re not busy, they start think­ing about oth­er jobs, when they’ve got a big job to do, or they’ve got a series of big jobs to work on. They’re engaged, and they’re kind of hap­py for that. Yep.

Kevin Lawrence 24:05

Per­fect. The next thing you can do, again, assum­ing you’re gonna put the ener­gy into this, and I rec­om­mend most you know, get all of your man­agers should be putting ener­gy into this nor­mal­ly, but you know, up the ante now is just look to remove the frus­tra­tions and the fric­tions in the sys­tem. Again, it’s not rock­et sci­ence. But one of the things that dri­ve peo­ple crazy. If the cof­fee is no good, replace it, if peo­ple are com­plain­ing, because, you know, I don’t know that they have to pay for the cof­fee. And if it’s cost­ing a $500 a year to pay for the cof­fee, who cares now, if it’s $50,000, maybe it’s some­thing dif­fer­ent. You know, if peo­ple are com­plain­ing about the air con­di­tion­ing, or which in many facil­i­ties, whether it’s indus­tri­al facil­i­ties or offices, the heat­ing and air con­di­tion­ing seems to be a big point of con­tention for peo­ple. You Do what you can to fix it or buy peo­ple portable space heaters if they’re too. Too cold. You know, if peo­ple are com­plain­ing about some­thing with the com­put­er sys­tems, what can you do to help fix it, maybe it’s train­ing, maybe it’s a sys­tem, maybe it’s their com­put­er. But when peo­ple have frus­tra­tions with the basics of doing their jobs, in many ways, they feel dis­re­spect­ed. Some­times as well, when they have those frus­tra­tions, it’s oppor­tu­ni­ties for mas­sive amounts of waste. But try­ing to lis­ten to those peo­ple. That’s why we do sur­veys, reg­u­lar­i­ty, ask­ing peo­ple about the things that are dri­ving them crazy that we should stop or the bru­tal facts that we should address. Or maybe it’s just that tox­ic jerk you have in the com­pa­ny who dri­ves every­thing cool, every­one crazy.

Brad Giles 25:45

Two of the three exam­ples you got there were about com­pa­ny perks, the cof­fee, or the air con­di­tion­ing, let’s say. But in my expe­ri­ence, I’ve done a lot of these par­tic­u­lar inter­views, ask­ing teams, what pre­vents you doing your job bet­ter. And almost all of the time, it’s things that reduce com­pa­ny effi­cien­cy. Almost all of the time, it’s sys­tems or process­es that are not work­ing as they should, or teen

Kevin Lawrence 26:19

sig­na­tures, bureau­crat­ic, super slow to long, what­ev­er it hap­pens to rework

Brad Giles 26:24

all of that kind of stuff. So the irony is, is that by focus­ing a lit­tle bit of time in here to remove their frus­tra­tions, you actu­al­ly improve the effi­cien­cy and effec­tive­ness of the busi­ness significantly.

Kevin Lawrence 26:37

Yep. And, and, and some­times it’s stuff where peo­ple often just need edu­ca­tion, like some­times process­es. The process as it’s defined is good. But the way that peo­ple are doing it isn’t Yeah, and then some­times it can be but it’s, again, we’re so busy run­ning the as his busi­ness that we don’t deal with some of these things that dri­ves peo­ple crazy. Num­ber six is some­thing your Brad you talk about in your book made to thrive, but the ambas­sador role. We also talk about it in Episode 66, I believe, yes. But it’s basi­cal­ly reselling and reset­ting the vision, and ensur­ing peo­ple are still proud of the com­pa­ny and the prod­uct. Now, one of our com­pa­nies that want we inter­est­ing, I’ve done quite a few vision resets for com­pa­nies, we had our retreat and Whistler recent­ly, and we were work­ing on ours as a firm as well. And now that we have 10 peo­ple in the core team is born. I know it’s even more impor­tant. But you know, anoth­er com­pa­ny worked with the neu­ron 25 years, and the divi­sions there. But it’s kind of got­ten a lit­tle blah. And they got a real bring life back into it. Because the com­pa­ny is a great com­pa­ny. Yeah, but you got to remind peo­ple about the great­ness and some­times you got to do a few things to spice up or, or bright­en up the great­ness so that peo­ple can get recon­nect­ed and re excit­ed about it again. Yeah, that’s why restau­rants do ren­o­va­tions, why brands come up with new logos and iden­ti­ties and slo­gans to keep it fresh and relevant?

Brad Giles 28:13

Yeah, then what do peo­ple have to be proud about? Or have to be proud about in your firm? Not your firm, Kevin, but in the lis­ten­ers firm? Are they proud of their prod­uct? Are they proud of their man­ag­er? Are they proud of the team? And what’s work­ing against that because, you know, if you work for a cig­a­rette man­u­fac­tur­er, let’s say your poor may not be as proud of the firm as they could be. And that’s going to be work­ing against, you know, the reten­tion efforts with­in the busi­ness. Now, that’s an extreme exam­ple, clear­ly an unusu­al exam­ple. But when you scale it back to think about, what is it that your firm does that makes peo­ple proud? Or could make peo­ple proud? And what is it that you aren’t doing to make peo­ple proud? Some of those things can actu­al­ly real­ly neg­a­tive­ly impact your reten­tion efforts in oth­er areas.

Kevin Lawrence 29:11

Yeah, 100%. Yeah, it’s not these things are not rock­et sci­ence. We just got to keep the ener­gy in it. And the final thing is to keep the cul­ture and fun­nel live, right? And again, espe­cial­ly dur­ing COVID, a lot of com­pa­nies being vir­tu­al or dis­persed or not togeth­er as much. No, it’s easy. I mean, vir­tu­al meet­ings are incred­i­bly effi­cient. No two ways. If you run if you know how to run them. Our vir­tu­al strap plan­ning ses­sions are more effec­tive than the in per­son node for the time, the val­ue for time, can’t beat them can­not, espe­cial­ly with big­ger groups. Now. You don’t get the fun. You don’t get the con­ver­sa­tions over cock­tails or you know, at our team retreat in Whistler, we had a Jen­ga chal­lenge between two dif­fer­ent we broke up into two teams. One game of Jen­ga was Like an hour and a half. And believe it or not, we actu­al­ly we believe that might have been one of the rea­sons we got a noise com­plaint for where we were. Because we’re hav­ing lit­er­al­ly an hour and a half one game of Jen­ga, but you get 10, hyper com­pet­i­tive peo­ple. And you don’t get to do that you don’t get to have an in per­son, you know, one of those big Jen­ga games, you don’t get to do that. You know, in per­son, you can’t, you know, do a bunch of oth­er fun things, which builds mem­o­ries and cre­ates a lot of fun. So even if you’re vir­tu­al, how do you keep the cul­ture and fun alive in a com­pa­ny, it’s not hard, we do a lot of things. Like, we have fun teams on most of our meet­ings, but they do ener­giz­ers on the breaks. It can be triv­ia, dance com­pe­ti­tions, like you name it exer­cis­es, we have key ques­tions, jokes, we have so many dif­fer­ent, it’s 90 sec­onds. But it is bring­ing some fun and ener­gy to a meet­ing that’s you know, you’re star­ing at a cam­era the whole time. So there’s tons of things you can do. It’s just eas­i­ly neglect­ed. And you know, and fun. And laugh­ter is the best anal­gesic, there is anal­gesic being some­thing that takes away pain. Laugh­ter fun is insanely

Brad Giles 31:11

pow­er­ful. And some­times there are peo­ple who are more fun, or let’s say, fun scenes with­in an orga­ni­za­tion, they’re just fun peo­ple. And so let­ting them thrive, let­ting them you know, take charge of some of these things can make a big dif­fer­ence. Because they, you know, they love doing it. They and you know, they’re there. They’re the fun that they cre­ate, through some of these things can res­onate through oth­er peo­ple and through oth­er teams.

Kevin Lawrence 31:38

Yep, absolute­ly. So it’s not right, it’s not rock­et sci­ence again, but it makes a dif­fer­ence. So let’s kind of run through our list. So remem­ber­ing that there’s a lot of expense to los­ing key peo­ple. And that real­ly, you got to put the same ener­gy into retain­ing your best clients as you do your best peo­ple. And you can do that by deeply know­ing your peo­ple like real­ly con­nect­ing with them and know­ing what’s going on in their world and their work. Stay inter­views to actu­al­ly under­stand where they’re at, and what needs to hap­pen for them to want to stay. The out­put that often might be num­ber for a career path, where, where you make sure that they’re crys­tal clear, and it’s in writ­ing, because some peo­ple can’t see it oth­er­wise, where they’re gonna go, Brad, you want to take the next cou­ple there,

Brad Giles 32:22

sure. And then remov­ing the frus­tra­tions for them. Some­times the frus­tra­tions can be if the effec­tive­ness or effi­cien­cy in your busi­ness mak­ing that improves sig­nif­i­cant­ly. So get­ting rid of those frus­tra­tions, that could be enough to help impact your reten­tion rate, then think­ing about the ambas­sador role, so your role is a leader, either the CEO or a leader of a depart­ment. And that Ambas­sador role being the ambas­sador. So as we men­tioned, we’d spo­ken about this role in Episode 66. But what we’re talk­ing about here rel­a­tive to this is reset­ting and reselling the vision ensur­ing that peo­ple are proud of their team, their man­ag­er, their prod­uct and their com­pa­ny, so that they’re able to, to expe­ri­ence that pride over­all and not let that get in the way. And then of course, the last one, keep­ing the cul­ture and the fun alive with­in the orga­ni­za­tion try­ing to make sure that it’s an active part of what you do find at work or hav­ing you know, fun friends at work can make a huge difference.

Kevin Lawrence 33:31

It does. Excel­lent good chat about reten­tion. We know we love our peo­ple, we say they’re our biggest asset and let’s just make sure we treat them that way. All right, well, thanks for lis­ten­ing. This has been the growth whis­pers pod­cast with Brad Giles and myself Kevin Lawrence. By the way, if you haven’t sub­scribed, go sub­scribe wher­ev­er you lis­ten to your pod­casts. For the video ver­sion, go to YouTube and search the growth whis­pers and for Brad evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com​.au and for myself and my firm Lawrence and co​.com. Have an awe­some week.