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Retaining Your Senior Talent

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I (and many others) keep talking about the major reductions in senior level talent coming our way.  Retirees will make up an increasing percentage of our population in the coming decades, and there are too many large shoes to fill.  One of the major challenges is to understand how we as HR organizations can enhance the retention, engagement and performance of this set of employees.

First of all, who is your senior talent?  Primarily, it’s your executives, those being groomed to be executives and senior practitioners.  They might be the partners of the firm.  Senior practitioners can be defined by you, but if you’re a law firm, they are your top attorneys.  If you’re a consulting firm, they are your partners.  If you are a pharma, it’s your senior scientists.  At any rate, you should know who in your organization are the people who contribute to strategy and profits the most.

High end senior talent is an odd group of people.  They blur the line between work and personal lives and space.  Often, there is no line.  How many executives have you seen on the beach in Hawaii with their Blackberry’s?  (they are pretty easy to pick out, don’t you think?)  How many of them can you send an e-mail to at 11pm and be confident you’ll have a response in 10 minutes?

They blur the line not because they are paid so much that they have to.  Your senior talent has earned the right to be called senior talent through years of effort, learning, and commitment.  There’s one other critical ingredient though.  Almost all of them are highly engaged.  They work so hard because they love what they do.  They key is not to retain them, but to determine how not to drive them away.

Here are a few ingredients to that equation:

  • Space:  Senior talent walk a fine line between autonomy and community – and sometimes you have to manage that line for them.  More than anyone else, senior talent are the ones who work at home or are on so many sales calls that nobody ever sees them.  They are in such high demand that being in the office and talking to their peers seems like wasted time.  However, they are also the ones who can not only share the most knowledge, but they also gain the most insights through these casual conversations.  Creating flexible workspaces that are a combination of office community, personal/private, and virtual are all important features that allow them to contribute to the community, but satisfy their need to private time for heads down work.
  • Innovation:  As I mentioned above, everyone has ideas.  And everyone passes ideas through casual conversation.  But these casual conversations are the most productive for senior talent.  This is because they are able to synthesize and connect data points that many others simply can’t you’re your key goal should be to provide space and forums for them to gain these ideas and synthesize them into best practices.
  • Engagement:  They already love what they do.  How do you keep them loving it?  Quite simple actually – keep giving them new challenges.  This might mean new projects, or having your senior executives communicate the need for new solutions to problems.  Sometimes though it’s just not possible to retain someone.  An external challenge or turnaround might be too alluring for some.  The key is to understand that senior talent can’t always be bought with more compensation – there’s always more money somewhere else.

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One response to “Retaining Your Senior Talent”

  1. systematicHR – Human Resources Strategy and Human Resources Technology » Retaining Your Senior Talent

  2. Retaining Your Senior Talent August 3, 2006 on 2:00 am | by Systematic HR I (and many others) keep talking about the major reductions in senior level talent coming our way.  Retirees will make up an increasing percentage of our population in the coming decades, and there are too

  3. systematicHR – Human Resources Strategy and Human Resources Technology » Retaining Your Senior Talent

  4. Sherry Li Avatar
    Sherry Li

    This is really a good article to give all HR people and line managers a direction to retain top talents in the organization.