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Talent Retention Musings

Someone, I think it may have been Confuscious, once said that if you are not recruiting your own people, you are the only company that isn't. 

Lots of people have asked me why I chose to leave Starbucks.  In fact, given my transition to Google, that has been one of the most common questions I've been asked.  It is interesting to be leaving one of the world's most respected and highly successful companies.  In over five years of service to Starbucks, we more than doubled the size of the company.  It's funny when you work at a hyper-growth company - when you think back, you can't really remember how big things were 'back then' so the growth is sometimes hard to measure.  This whole episode in my life makes me really consider the topic of retention of talent, and what the key tenents of successful talent retention really rest on.

It is hard to imagine a greater intangible cost to an organization than turnover of top talent (except for maybe brand erosion), yet I think the majority of companies do not proactively address the issue effectively.    One significant challenge is that when someone leaves a company, the opportunity cost of their departure is never really identified or measured.  If it was quantified, I think more companies would pay much closer attention to this cost of doing business. 

The older I get, the more I think this topic of 'talent retention' is really just about effective leadership.  Given that I've had a fair amount of time off the last two weeks, here are some of my thoughts regarding retaining top talent. 

1. Leaders Must Authentically Value People: 

This is simplistic in theory, but often difficult in practice.  It's been my experience that there are those that model this very well (few) and those that don't model this at all or to an ineffective degree (many).  This is a leadership philosophy that must be authentic.  A leader of people cannot sustainably feign the behavior of truly valuing people.  There are three pitfalls that stand in the way of this:

One natural pitfall that most leaders face is an inherent ambivalence towards talent as one grows in one's career.  I think it is rooted in human nature to become this way, unless one identifies this risk and addresses it mindfully and proactively.  Let me explain.

One of the significant human challenges of leadership is that in highly dynamic corporate environments (such as hyper-growth companies such as Starbucks or Google), teams and people are constantly in motion, so the process is one of continual investment in relationships that, at least from a team-building perspective, are nearly always temporary, and fairly short-lived.  This is highly problematic on a human level, as it's a constant investment-then-cleave cycle.  Just as one builds 'the right team' something changes to upset the apple cart and the rebuilding process starts again.  This can be a catalyst for ambivalence.  In reality, leadership is a state of constant-build, and one has to monitor one's attitudes and sentiments as a leader so the motivation and effort regarding valuing people continues to be sustained in a healthy manner.

I just finished reading the book Resonant Leadership and I think it explores this topic in helpful detail.

The second potential hurdle that leaders face is that many organizations measure productivity for a leader in ways that run counter to a 'servant leader' approach.  This creates an inherent tension between building for the long haul through leadership and people investment or 'getting the work done' that is succinctly measurable in the here and now.  Effective leaders must balance these two goals, and have the courage to slow the production lines (if necessary) in the short term in order to achieve long term gains.   

The final obstacle is simply that human beings tend to think of themselves first, so changing that focus to rest on others is difficult, particularly in light of the stresses inherent in worklife.  This is compounded by the long-term versus short-term ROI dichotomy.

     2.  Make Talent Feel Valued: 

There is a ridiculously deep irony buried in a discussion of 'talent retention' or 'turnover' in that making people feel valued costs nothing.  One doesn't have to spend a single budgetary dollar to make people feel valued.  This relates succinctly back to point #1, but the two elements are distinctly different.  Point #1 happens internally with a leader, and is a critical part of self-awareness.  Point #2 are the demonstrative behaviors and observable actions that demonstrate Point #1. 

Most people feel the most valued when you help them get better at what they do, and assist them with achieving their own best self.  I've always told my management teams that leaders are like coaches in sports, and even the best players (Michael Jordan comes to mind) need feedback to achieve optimal performance.  Mostly, a coach simply observes behavior and gives feedback in order to fine tune performance and results.  Doing this activity alone with a team makes people feel imminently valued by a leader.  This coaching model of leadership relies on direct feedback of observable behavior, which many leaders don't find the time to do. 

Beyond helping people become their own best self, there are a host of other tactical things to make people feel valued that are well-documented in books and other readings.  I submit that all of these additional tactics are ancillary and less important than an investment in people that helps them get better at what they do, which is how to truly value people.

     3.) Monitor the Health of Your Organization by Building Relationships at All Levels: 

If you don't have relationships built with people throughout your organization, you'll never know that talent is satisfied until it is too late.  This is one of the systemic mistakes that I've observed many leaders make -- the mistake of only gauging the health of their organization by what their direct reports tell them.  This is a big mistake.  Everyone matters (see point #1) and if you build solid relationships with people at all levels, then you'll know what is really going on. 

Again, it sometimes difficult to accomplish this relationship building because paradoxically there  is always a lot of work to be done.  Effective leaders must take the time to make these investments. 

One Answer to The Question

There is one question that I get asked more often than any other question by people I meet who are aspiring to be great recruiters.  In fact, I've now come to call it The Question. 

It is a little ironic that the inspiration for this post came from the side of a Starbucks cup this morning.  I ventured out of the house today, despite the Seattle cold, rain and snow-threatening skies, and went to my local Starbucks to get my morning Grande Drip Coffee With Room for Cream.  I personally fill the room with nonfat milk but that is how you order it.  Did you know there are 55,000 different drink variations at your local Starbucks?  That is one of the things they told me before I left. 

So I'm sitting there sipping my coffee, and on the side of the cup is The Way I See It #119.  I actually saved the cup, and am staring at it now.  Have you seen these?  These are little quips or quotations that are designed to make you think, and start a conversation whilst you are sipping on one of those Starbucks beverages.  Number 119 works pretty well I guess.  I always thought we should have slipped in a little subtle employment branding on that cup-side real estate, but I digress.   Maybe The Way I See It #984 will say, "Why I work at Starbucks...or my greatest experience as a Starbucks partner was when..." and then tell a little anecdote about how great the company is.  You can actually read more or respond to these cup-side quotations by going to this link.

The Way I See It #119 says, "As you sip your coffee, think about all the science behind it: in agriculture, processing, roasting, extraction.  Then think of all the science around you:  in your cell phone, your computer, even your food. Shouldn't everyone be educated to understand the science that permeates their lives? -- Dr. David Baltimore, President, California Institute of Technology, and Nobel laueate in Physiology or Medicine."  Which leads me to The Question.

As I mentioned, I get asked The Question by junior recruiters or other people who are new to the recruiting profession on a regular basis:  "What advice do you have for me as I'm starting out on my way to becoming a really great recruiter?"

Because of how prevalent this question is, I've spent a fair amount of time during the last few years of my senior leadership career contemplating The Question, and I've boiled it down to this foundational tenent:  The difference between great recruiters (or recruiting managers) and other recruiters (whether that be average recruiters or 'not-great recruiters' or anything in-between) is how they approach their personal learning.  I believe this is the primary differentiator between The Great Ones and The Others. 

I was having this very conversation with a member of my extended team at Starbucks right before I left.  Her name is Eden and she is very smart and has great communication skills (which are two prerequisite competencies to be a great recruiter) but she doesn't have much recruiting experience as she is just getting started in her recruiting career.  She asked me The Question, and I tried to share with her this concept of what I call Advanced Personal Learning (APL).  I'm sure this holds true for other professions, but all I know is recruiting so if you aren't in recruiting, YMMV.

So I was sharing with her that as one considers all of the learning one does in one's life, it mostly falls into the schooling years, and then dramatically drops off after one graduates from an institute of higher learning.  Letting this commitment and discipline related to learning diminish after school is one of the biggest mistakes a recruiting professional (and others) can make.  We all worked (at least relatively) hard in school, because that was the purpose:  cram as much learning into those years in order to prepare you for The Next Part of Your Life.  Using my advanced Microsoft Excel skills, I created a nifty graph you can click to illustrate what I'm talking about.

  But if one considers that the world continues to grow in complexity year over year (and I would argue at an exponential rate) a career strategy that does not involve APL is a road to obsolescence.  Many professions have an inherent checks and balances component that keeps people in the game.  For example, members of the medical profession are continuously challenged to learn and grow their personal knowledge and skill base or they will quickly become ineffective (and unemployed) practitioners.  Advances in medicinal technology, diagnosis, treatment and drug therapy, et cetera all require a medical professional to apply APL as part of the way they manage their career.  Software development, lawyers, IT professionals,... the list goes on regarding the types of professions that have these 'checks and balances' to keep their professional careerists focused on personal learning.

One challenge with professions like recruiting (or HR in general) is that the inherent checks and balances are generational in nature.  Indeed, many do not recognize this dynamic until it is too late.  If one is a corporate professional, one might want to think about this statement for a moment.

But recruiting and HR have grown in complexity over the last decade in the exact same manner as medicine or other more technically focused disciplines.  10 years ago, things were a lot less complex in recruiting then they are today (and because of this, the skills required to be a recruiter were different):

• applicant tracking systems were all client / server achitecture (if that) and none were hosted applications or had near the feature set of those today.  Restrac comes to mind.
• technology based assessments were uncommon
• other recruiting tools such as Jobster, H3, LinkedIn, and similar technology extensions did not exist
• few companies had websites and the level of transparency and information that candidates possessed was nothing compared to today
• the candidate population was barely online.  Faxed or hardcopy resumes were the norm
• and the list of changes and additional complexities go on and on and on...

So the answer to The Question is to develop a discipline to apply Advanced Personal Learning so as to become and remain a true subject matter expert in recruiting.   I am always a little surprised how few people recognize this in their careers, or apply any sort of proactive efforts to evolve their skills, given that the world around them is racing ahead in terms of complexity and innovation (yes even in recruiting).  Based on my observations there are few true SMEs in the recruiting profession.  To be truly great at recruiting, one should become an expert in all components of the recruiting lifecycle.  How does one get there?  Apply the discipline of APL.

There are some relatively simple things that recruiting professionals can do to propel their career if they apply a level of discipline to the effort:

• Read Books:  By books I mean business books.  Some recent ones I have read are to the right.  Reading makes you smarter, and uses a different part of your brain than you use at work.  Additionally, all of a recruiters' best customers and business leaders are reading books.  Savvy recruiting professionals should read them to.  My advice:  One should always be reading a good business or skills-related book.  When you are done with the book, give them to your customers to read, and talk about them with others.
• Read Other Stuff:  Blogs.  Periodicals.  Other online resources.  Other periodicals such as the Harvard Business Review, Businessweek Magazine; I like Wired magazine as a fringe example.  My Advice:  One should read 2-4 hours a week if one wants to to be an expert.  Make it part of a daily routine. 
• Network:  I wrote this post a few months ago on the value of networking.  The value of networking cannot be overstated, regardless of the profession you might be in.  My advice:  Crack the code on effective networking, but keep the bar high with regards to the connections you make and the quality of those relationships.  Learn from others, and ask questions of those that have gone before.  One should spend 1/2 hour to 1 hour a week focused on networking outside of one's company.
• Get really clear on what Subject Matter Expertise means:  If you aren't an expert at negotiation, objection handling and understanding negotiation theory, then you aren't a SME.  If you aren't an expert at qualifying the needs of your hiring managers, and asking the tough questions, you aren't a SME.  Sales skills.  Sourcing skills.  Consultation skills.  Communication skills.  Interview skills.  Time management and productivity skills.  The list goes on.  My Advice:  map out everything that goes into the candidate lifecycle (I like to do so with a pie chart or a wheel chart.)  Then pick an area and go deep in your studies and develop expertise.  Find those around you that are great, and learn from them. 

So going back to the Starbucks cup:  maybe we should understand the science that permeates our lives, or maybe we shouldn't.  I personally do not need to know how my cellular phone works.  But to be really great at recruiting, one should apply advanced personal learning as a discipline in one's career.

And that is one answer to The Question.