The 'Great Resignation': 5 strategies to retain your talented leaders
Photo by Saad Chaudhry on Unsplash
November 30th, 2021
Ann Collins
The ‘Great Resignation’ is causing huge ripples in the leadership world and as job vacancies soar, companies are feeling uneasy about the future and how to hold on to their talent in a market where talented leaders can shop around. But what do these talented leaders want?
In light of a changing and more demanding landscape in the world of work, the Global Leadership Forecast, 2021, recently published by DDI, highlighted the urgent need to retain and develop leaders in the near future. This reflected the ongoing concerns of both CEOs and HR professionals. It’s clear from their report that many organisations have been working hard to foster a culture of flexibility, improve diversity and inclusion, and provide high quality leadership development coaching and training programmes.
Despite these valuable solutions, there are still two outstanding issues that need to be addressed:
How we help leaders to be both willing and able to step into the highest level role
How we make it so that leaders decide to stay, not leave
The latter point is largely absent from the discussion and consequently the research and collective voice of leaders is hard to hear.
Studies, such as the DDI, present the view that if we wish to retain our existing, talented leaders as well as our future ones, we need to understand what they desire, what's important to them - and why - and how they envisage their future.
We need to speak to them - and listen
A perfect storm is brewing in the world of leadership. Employees have experienced a taste of a new world where the possibility of change and flexibility exists but where many are rethinking their purpose, their roles in the world and how they want to live their lives - which rarely includes working a 70 hour week!
Simultaneously, organisations require high calibre people who can be adaptable, strategic, creative, innovative, have influence on others and help them develop in a fast-paced and changing environment. Exceptional people are required to fill these demanding roles. Many of my clients are these exceptional people, however, they are wary.
Why? Because often they believe that a stimulating, strategic, ‘big’ role is not possible to maintain whilst essentially ‘having a life’, where they have time and energy for family, friends and to pursue other interests. The human cost is too high for many and this is leaving talented leaders frustrated: they want to have both!
The current solutions being proposed by the world of leadership are two-pronged:
actively implement and encourage wellbeing in the workplace (often in the form of looking after one’s mental health, physical fitness, nutrition, meditation etc), and
providing high quality leadership development and support.
Whilst I feel that both of those strategies are important, we need to explore, on a much deeper level, the culture and attitudes around career progression and leadership for the individual and those within organisations.
Leaders are often working very long days and, in order to progress, they feel the need to be present, visible and available for the informal contact that is so important in the office (often identified as one of the downsides for those who want to continue to work from home). Goals within organisations tend to be short term in nature and the focus on productivity and efficiency is high. Life is ‘busy’.
The conundrum that organisations face, in order to meet the challenges of today, is that they need leaders who are creative, flexible, innovative and able to develop and coach their teams. And they need to do this whilst making quality connections, focussing on the long term development of people and the quality of everyday interactions within an organisation.
As a society we have equated burnout with too much work and not enough time. It has therefore been a logical step by companies to support staff to be more efficient with their time management, so that they have more time to complete tasks to help reduce the risk of burnout. Unfortunately, we know from research that burnout is not caused by being ‘busy’, but is actually emotional exhaustion caused by the complexities of not being able to manage our reactions to stress.
We need to learn how to recognise what triggers our reactions to stress, in order to deal with the situation we find ourselves faced with. Emily and Amelia Nagoski elaborate on this in Burnout: The Secret to Solving The Stress Cycle, p27 saying that “... to be ‘well’ is not about living in a state of perpetual safety and calm, but to move fluidly from a state of adversity, risk, adventure, or excitement, back to safety and calm, and out again. Stress is not bad for you; being stuck is bad for you.”
Tackling burnout as primarily a time management issue, is therefore missing the mark, as it’s a symptom and not a cause: our model of leadership and leadership development is not working for the complex environment in which we find ourselves.
We need existing leaders who can make better human connections and have the emotional capacity to operate at a higher level of empowering others, finding creative solutions and developing leaders for the future. For this, we need to give leaders time, allow them to have high energy levels and to have a resilient and growth mindset and to have those fundamental skills to manage their emotions.
How can we find a way that will allow leaders to be the leaders that we need them to be? Traditional wellbeing programmes, whilst a help, rarely address the shift in mindset, thinking and patterns of behaviour that are required to operate at an optimal level.
If we don’t support leaders in this, I predict that they will vote with their feet and leave.
What is the solution?
1. Define and agree what a successful leader is in your organisation by talking to them
Prioritise the most important qualities that are required and then identify how work time can be best organised to utilise them. For example, if creativity is valued, how do meetings need to be structured to ensure they allow for creativity to flourish?
2. Collaborate to challenge, expand and define what ‘wellbeing’ means in your company
It probably will include physical health, but ideally it needs to go beyond this. To uplevel the impact of increased wellbeing, we need to uplevel our definition of wellbeing: if wellbeing is feeling good and functioning well, it includes personal growth.
Wellbeing is the ability to thrive.
3. Invest in personal development for leaders at all levels
If we wish leaders - and their teams - to be able to develop and learn, we need to provide access to personal development opportunities to transform the way they think to become the leaders they want to be. This basic work provides leaders with the ability to lead and empower others, whilst allowing themselves to fail and learn.
Organisations that encourage, implement and embed the learning from programmes of personal development will be the employers whose leaders thrive with confidence, energy and vision. They will be the leaders who really do ‘have it all’.
4. Leading from the top
‘Be the change you want to see’ is a saying that is not new.
Understanding burnout is important for leaders at all levels. Burnout is emotional exhaustion and is caused by a lack of connection with ourselves, with others and a lack of compassion towards ourselves. Poor time management and feeling physically exhausted is often seen as a symptom, but it is very important to understand the cause. Then, at a c-suite level, it is important to accept that our teams are often a mirror of ourselves, as relationships are - they give us a clue into our behaviour.
If you want to see a team better connected, avoid burnout and have more compassion for themselves, model it. Focus on your connection with yourself, do the personal development work and become aware of your inner voice and how it's serving you. Observe what happens.
5. See the opportunity in the storm
Research shows that candidates who are promoted internally have a 25% higher chance of success than externally recruited ones, so this makes sense. As all good business people know, retaining clients makes sense; likewise with retaining and developing talent. By diving deep into wellbeing, looking at how to help leaders and staff throughout an organisation truly thrive, you are opening up possibilities of fast, creative development within your organisation.
6. Slow down to speed up
In a blog post, you were probably hoping for a few quick tips that deliver your solutions as the above might sound like hard work!
In the fast-moving world of leadership, we need to stop and allow time for the discussion that is required to put this into practice. The pause button is not always the easiest one to press: ironically because we're always too busy!
If we want leaders and their teams to thrive, we need to accept this is a ‘lifestyle change’ for the organisation, not a quick fix! Putting fruit in the kitchen and arranging lunchtime yoga sessions simply isn’t enough.
Find out more about Ann Collins and her work in this area:
At Blue Bottle Coaching, we provide a long-term package of consultancy, coaching, training and support for c-suite and their teams, where we design a bespoke programme designed to promote the development of high performing teams centred around wellbeing and allowing people to thrive.
For more information: bluebottlecoaching@gmail.com