by Alison Green
Of course, as you develop strategies for keeping great staff members, make sure that you’re strategic about which employees you focus those efforts on. Your goal is to retain your high performers, not the mediocre or low performers, so focus your efforts accordingly.
METHODS FOR RETAINING HIGH PERFORMERS
Contrary to conventional wisdom, retention isn’t just about salaries and benefits packages. Although these do matter, retention most often comes from ensuring that high-performing staff members feel valued, have opportunities to grow, and have a manager who helps them focus on meeting ambitious, meaningful, and challenging goals.
However, as with most of the rest of management, adapt your approach to fit the context. Different staffers are motivated in different ways, so develop an individualized strategy tailored to each staffer you’re trying to retain. Here are some of the potential levers you might incorporate in your retention strategy.
Meaningful Roles with Real Responsibility
Don’t underestimate the power of being truly engaged in important work. Staff members who are able to have a real impact on the organization’s success and who “own” their areas and its successes or failures are more likely to feel satisfied with their work and to stay focused on the challenges in front of them rather than seeking out new challenges somewhere else.
Sense of Progress
Inherent in the idea of having a real impact is a sense of movement and progress. To understand why this is so key to retention, imagine that you’re hiking to the top of a large mountain. If you’re seeing milestones along the way that let you mark your progress, you’re going to stay focused on reaching the top; you’re not going to be thinking about hiking a different mountain! But if your journey feels never ending and you’re not seeing any signs of progress, you’re more likely to give up. For instance, a staff member might be invested in a goal of getting her program to be 100 percent self-funded. Setting quarterly benchmarks of 25, 50, and 75 percent will help her feel the satisfaction that comes with making progress along the way.
PROGRESS: THE STRONGEST MOTIVATOR
One multiyear study found that progress is the strongest motivator of performance. The authors, Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, wrote in “What Really Motivates Workers” (Harvard Business Review, January-February 2010, pp. 44–45, “On days when workers have the sense they’re making headway in their jobs, or when they receive support that helps them overcome obstacles, their emotions are most positive and their drive to succeed is at its peak. On days when they feel they are spinning their wheels or encountering roadblocks to meaningful accomplishment, their moods and motivation are lowest. . . . Making progress in one’s work—even incremental progress—is more frequently associated with positive emotions and high motivation than any other workday event.”
Growth
Don’t let your best employees get bored, and don’t make them go elsewhere to continue to grow in their careers. Here are three ways to avoid those pitfalls:
New challenges. As great employees master an area, increase the bar so they are challenged to do better and better within that area. For instance, once your fundraising director hits her $5 million annual goal, you might agree on a higher goal for next year or even for three years down the road (tied, of course, to what the organization needs to accomplish in order to fulfill its mission).
Increased responsibility. Aside from new challenges within existing areas of responsibility, you can add entirely new responsibilities to the plate of an employee who has proven she’s ready for them. That said, be sure the strategy here is tailored to the individual. Some staff members see increased responsibilities as an affirmation of trust and a chance to develop new skills. Others, depending on where they are in life and what factors they’re contending with outside work (such as a new baby or an ailing relative), might see them as a burden rather than a reward.
Grooming. Sometimes your best performers may not thrive in a more advanced role. Others have the talents to move on to the next level, so give these staff members an idea of what their career development plan might look like if they stay with your organization. Think about what they can do in their current role to prepare them for the next rung on the ladder and then talk to them explicitly about that. For instance, if you are a communications director with a phenomenal marketing associate, you might have her attend higher-level meetings with you and explain that you want her exposed to the issues discussed there. You might also ask her to begin drafting some of the press releases you normally draft and give her feedback on them, again explaining that you want to help her prepare for the next step in her career. And you might even tell her explicitly, “In two years, I could see you taking on this role.”
Direct Discussion
In our experience, few managers discuss the subject of retention with staff members directly. Take a valued staff member out to lunch or for coffee to talk about her future and ask her directly, “How can we make sure you stay for the next two years?” Even if you don’t get an immediate commitment, having an explicit discussion and showing that you care enough to talk about it can go a long way.
Positive Reinforcement and Feeling Valued
Don’t underestimate the impact of regularly making sure great staff members know you think they’re great. Let them know that you notice their accomplishments and that you value everything they’re bringing to the organization.
Salaries
Although retention isn’t just about money, money can help. Your best staff members are probably not motivated by money, but they’re probably not blind to it either. They will have many opportunities to make an impact in the world, and the reality is that money can sometimes sway their decisions about where they apply their talents.
Unfortunately, most nonprofits radically underinvest in salaries for their best people. Instead, they might pour as much money as possible into direct program work. While well intentioned, this can end up having the opposite of the desired effect: harming program activities by making it harder to attract and keep the people who will execute those activities most effectively. Your best performers get dramatically better results than the average—often five or more times better. If one high performer will get better results than several mediocre performers combined, paying your best staff members quite well can actually be an extremely economical move.
At a minimum, salaries should not be a reason people leave. Beyond that, ideally your salaries would be high enough that your best people know that while they might make more money elsewhere, they’ll never make this much money and do work this interesting and contribute as much as they do with you.
In our experience, significant changes in salary can be game-changing, convincing employees who might otherwise have moved on to stay. For instance, at Teach For America, Jerry had a staff member he desperately wanted to retain but who was considering graduate school. He knew that a small salary increase would not change her mind. Instead, he offered her a 50 percent increase, which amounted to tens of thousands of dollars. She stayed, and the dramatically higher-than-expected salary increase changed her entire way of thinking about her position and future with the organization. She is still there as one of the top leaders of the organization, and the investment in her salary continues to pay enormous dividends.
Titles
Titles cost nothing and can be an effective way to recognize employees’ development. For instance, your outstanding membership assistant might be rewarded for her achievements with the title of development officer, or you might recognize your superb communications coordinator’s work by changing her title to assistant communications manager. You want titles to be accurate, of course, and as an organization grows, there is often an overall structure within which titles must be consistent. Nevertheless, there is often room to be creative in this area.
WHAT NOT TO DO, OR HOW TO LOSE YOUR BEST EMPLOYEES
Just as important as giving staff members motivators to stay is making sure you don’t demot
ivate them through behaviors like yelling, creating a climate of fear, or letting serious problems go unresolved. (In short, as we discuss in Chapter Ten, don’t be a tyrant or a wimp.)
Because a manager has such a pervasive impact on the day-to-day work environment, an employee’s relationship with her direct supervisor is one of the factors that most strongly influences job satisfaction. As Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman write, “An employee may join [an organization] because she is lured by their generous benefits package and their reputation for valuing employees. But it is her relationship with her immediate manager that will determine how long she stays and how productive she is while she is there. . . . Managers trump companies.”1
No matter how much a staff member likes her job or the organization, if she has a bad relationship with her manager, it will seep into her quality of life every day. Therefore, it’s important to treat your staffers with respect and decency. This doesn’t mean shying away from having tough conversations or delivering constructive feedback (to the contrary, great employees tend to want such feedback) but simply approaching your staffers as people, showing that you care about them (if you were Jerry’s boss, maybe even laughing at his jokes), and treating them as you yourself would want to be treated.
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Now that you’re on the road to keeping your high performers, we’ll turn to one of the hardest realities managers face: the unavoidable fact that you won’t want to retain everyone. Just as you shouldn’t leave retention to chance, chance shouldn’t come into play when it comes to moving people out either. In the next chapter, we discuss how to transition out employees who aren’t helping to propel you forward.
KEY POINTS
If you want great results, retain your great (and only your great) employees.
Different staffers are motivated in different ways, so develop an individualized strategy tailored to each person you’re trying to retain.
Retention strategies can include ensuring that staff members have meaningful roles with real responsibility and a sense of progress in their work; providing opportunities to take on new challenges; direct discussion; regularly providing positive feedback; having a strong, positive employee-manager relationship; and ensuring that titles reflect growth.
Most nonprofits radically underinvest in staff salaries, which can harm program activities by making it harder to attract and keep the people who will execute those activities most effectively. Since one high performer may get better results than several mediocre performers combined, paying your best staff members quite well can end up being extremely economical.
Additional Reading
Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, “What Really Motivates Workers,” Harvard Business Review, Jan.–Feb. 2010, pp. 44–45.
Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), especially “ The Measuring Stick” and “Putting the Twelve to the Test” (pp. 25–36).
1 Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), p. 36.
TOOL 8.1
SAMPLE RETENTION CHART
Taking just sixty seconds to think through your strategy for retaining your top performers and then transferring those actions to your to-do list can make the difference between keeping a star staff member long-term or losing her to another opportunity.
Who How
Jaime W. Be sure to praise his work at conference; ask the board chair to call and do the same
Increase his responsibility over our northeast section?
Carla M. Take her to lunch to discuss her future with us
She’s thinking about school; talk about what her impact will be here if she stays another two years
CHAPTER 9
ADDRESSING PERFORMANCE PROBLEMS AND LETTING PEOPLE GO
Even with the best efforts to hire well and develop your people, the reality is that you are going to have some staff members who simply don’t perform at the level that you need. This is an unavoidable reality of managing, and one of the most important things you can do as a manager is to address it head-on. By addressing these situations in a forthright and matter-of-fact manner, you can sometimes help an employee get to the level you need. But when that doesn’t work, you can lay the groundwork for letting the employee go in a way that is fair and compassionate to her. In this chapter, we’ll talk about how you can move employees who aren’t performing at the level you need “up or out”—successfully, fairly, and quickly.
A few words about the “out” part of this: we know letting someone go is difficult. We’ve both been guilty on multiple occasions of waiting too long to move out lower performers. It’s especially tough when the staff member isn’t flagrantly underperforming (or lying, stealing, or committing other ethical violations), but rather does contribute somewhat while still not getting you the results that you need. Because most people like to give others additional chances and don’t like telling people they can’t meet our required needs, managers too often shy away from firing when they should. As a result, most managers do not remove low or mediocre performers quickly enough or frequently enough.
Letting people go is hard, but it’s also critically important. We’ve both been shocked after we let people go and brought in new staff by just how much more the new people accomplished. And of course, not being assertive in this area has particularly dire consequences in the nonprofit world, where having a weak link directly harms our ability to deliver on our missions to the communities we serve.
If you’re serious about getting results, you will have to fire people. You can do everything else right—setting goals and expectations, delegating effectively, giving feedback, and retaining your best—but if you aren’t willing to fire people who aren’t performing at the level you need, you will never accomplish what you could.
In this chapter, we start with how to determine if a performance issue is a serious problem. Then we look at two methods for dealing with the issue: the textbook approach of progressive discipline (informal warnings, formal warnings, and letting people go) and the less traditional method of coaching out. In coaching out, you and the employee mutually agree that continued tenure in the role doesn’t make sense and agree on a transition plan that leaves you both better off than progressive discipline might.
REASONS MANAGERS RESIST LETTING EMPLOYEES GO
The vast majority of managers err on the side of not firing when they should. Let’s take a look at some of the most common reasons managers tend to resist letting low performers go:
Believing that everyone deserves another chance (and another, and another). This belief is especially common in nonprofits, which are often staffed by people who highly value compassion and believe in giving people chances to develop. But as tempted as you may be to be lenient with struggling performers, don’t lose sight of the fact that your donors are paying you to advance your mission and the beneficiaries of your work are counting on you to deliver. And no matter how personally kind it may be, a commitment to providing a job for someone mediocre is contrary to that mission.
Believing that you haven’t invested enough in helping the person. Yes, you should help people succeed—but within reason. You’re never going to have done absolutely everything you could have done to create the optimal environment for every staff member to excel in. Take a look at what top performers have done in similar contexts. Would they have found a way to succeed with the same amount of resources and guidance?
Feeling overwhelmed by the amount of time it would take to bring a new person up to speed. Managers tend to overestimate how much time it will take a new employee to become trained and start delivering value compared to the person currently in the role. Strong performers get up to speed far faster than you realize. Besides, even if this weren’t true, wouldn’t you rather have a short period of downtime followed by an all-out stellar pe
rformance, as opposed to years of mediocrity (or worse)?
Hoping that the employee will leave on her own. A bad situation rarely gets better without direct intervention. You don’t leave your fundraising or program execution to wishful thinking; you make decisions and take action. Why would you leave something as crucial as having the right staff to chance?
Feeling bad or feeling sorry for the staff member. It’s okay to feel sorry for the staff member; after all, getting fired is no one’s ideal outcome. But if you handle the situation directly and honestly, she’ll know that it’s coming, she’ll have had the chance to improve, and you can be kind as you help her move out of a job that she may never thrive in (and you can even help her brainstorm about other jobs she might be more suited for). Not only are you doing a disservice to your mission by keeping a low performer on staff, but you’re also doing a disservice to the employee herself by keeping her in a job that doesn’t fit her well.
Feeling nonprofits should be more egalitarian than for-profit organizations. Sure, nonprofits have different missions from those in the private sector, but we’re not different in our need for high performance. In fact, we should be more committed to high performance, because so much more is at stake.
Let’s be honest: these are all excuses. Ultimately the most common reason people wait too long in these situations is about avoiding discomfort or hassle for ourselves. Just as with dating, putting off the day of reckoning (or trying to avoid it altogether by ignoring the problem or hoping the other person acts so you don’t have to) is unfair to the person, who could be using this time to find something that is right. And unlike dating, as managers we get paid to handle difficult situations.
