Thread: Hang On To Top Employees

The best way to keep your top employees is to know them better than they know themselves. Use this knowledge to create the career of their dreams, and they’ll stick to your company like glue. The new “biz-speak” for this is called Job Sculpting.

The concept of Job Sculpting as defined by career experts, Timothy Butler and James Wardroom, in the Harvard Business Review, is that good people will stay only in jobs that “fit their deeply embedded life interests---that is their long-held emotionally driven passions.”

To adopt this strategy, spend a lot of effort listening to your company stars. For each one of them, try to identify what life interests are dominant with them, and then offer them the assignments that satisfy this interest. It may mean simply adding another assignment to the existing responsibilities, or it may mean switching one set of tasks to another employee. It may even require moving your “star” employee to a different position altogether.

To learn what kind of interests you’re looking and listening for, use these 8 identifiable areas:
1. Application of technology.
2. Quantitative analysis ability.
3. Theory development and conceptual thinking.
4. Creative production.
5. Counseling and mentoring.
6. Managing people and relationships.
7. Enterprise control.
8. Influence through language and ideas.