There are a number of reasons why it is in a business’s best interests to nurture their key talent. For one thing, experience is not something that can be taught. The longer an employee works for you, the more valuable they become. When you spot key talent in your organization, you will want to keep them with you. The longer they stay with you, the more important it becomes to retain them.
Naturally, this can mean that, as thrilling as it is for any business owner to realize that they have a really rare and valuable worker on their hands, it can also be anxiety-inducing trying to retain them in your organization.
In order to stand the best chance possible at retaining key talent and ensuring that the talent you do retain wants to remain loyal to your business, you will need to have a predefined strategy for identifying and nurturing talent. In pursuit of this, it is wise to involve other management and leadership figures within your business.
Make sure that anyone in your business who you feel has a role to play in ensuring that you are meeting the needs of, and retaining, your key talent, understand how important you consider this to be. You will have to lead by example to really drive the message home. Here are some top tips for instituting better policies for nurturing the talent within your business.
Create a Learning Culture
If you want the most important and talented members of your team to stick around in the long term, you will have to prove to them that you can help them to continually advance their careers throughout that time. If they sense that they are undervalued, or they could get a better deal elsewhere, most people will think nothing of abandoning you for greener pastures.
One of the most important ways that you can demonstrate this commitment to them is to create a culture that emphasizes the value of continuing to learn and grow. You want to create the kind of business environment where your most talented players aren’t afraid to exercise their talents and show initiative. If your business environment Is one that mercilessly punishes mistakes, your most talented workers will be afraid to demonstrate their full potential.
It is by making mistakes and learning how notto do things that we are often able to do our most profound learning. It is, therefore, vital that, to the extent that it is reasonable and sensible, your key talent is confident in showing off their abilities.
As well as cultivating both talent and confidence in the short term, in the long term, a learning culture will help to foster the key talent in your business that might one day be leadership material.
Be Mindful of Their Ambitions
If you want your key talent to really soar, you will need them to be as motivated as possible. The best way of ensuring that your employees are able to remain motivated, both in the immediate future and with respect to their long-term careers, is to make sure that you are helping to steer them in the right direction for their personal goals.
When you help to nurture key talent, your ultimate hope is that they will be able to take on a role in your business where they are able to impart some of their wisdom and knowledge to those around them. However, if you don’t prepare them properly for the role, particularly by demonstrating to them the kind of skills they will need to excel as a leader, it can all fall apart. Some of the best workers are never able to transition into good leaders.
While these future leaders are still key talent within your business, ask them regularly about their hopes and ambitions, as well as their current job satisfaction. This is all the kind of information that they will need to take from their own junior staff if they are to excel as leaders themselves.
Finding out what your employees’hopes and ambitions are will also tell you a great deal about them as individuals. This information could prove invaluable in ensuring that they remain happy and motivated within your business. By considering the hopes and dreams of your workers collectively, you can gain some valuable insight into the nature of the group that you have to work with.
Encourage them to Diversify
On the surface of it, a promotion sounds like an unambiguously good thing. However, sometimes people are hesitant to accept what appears to be an objectively better position. There are a number of reasons that people feel compelled to hesitate, but the most common is that they feel the nature of their work will change too dramatically.
Sometimes, advancing through an organization to the next level up in the hierarchy means foregoing the kind of work that someone is currently doing. A better alternative, where it is available, might be, as they say, to “advance sideways”. This means moving to a position that is not more senior but is in a different area of the business.
Doing this offers a number of benefits to the employee in question. For one thing, they will learn a new set of skills and get to experience a different type of work. This will give them a more varied resume to show to potential future employers and will allow them to test the waters if they are considering a more permanent change in career.
If they find themselves well suited to the area of the business that they transfer to, this could present them with another fork in the road when they do feel ready to take a promotion. The exact nature and number of the opportunities that an employee gains by doing this will vary according to the specifics of the situation.
Where it is appropriate, and desirable, for them to seek out a straight promotion, you can assist them in doing so by helping them obtain any relevant qualifications. For example, if they are considering moving up to a management position within human resources, you can click the following link to search the best human resources training courses and find a suitable management-level human resources training course.
Lead By Example
It’s no good trying to convince your most talented individuals to invest fully in your business if you are not willing to invest in them. Show them the kind of leader that you want them to develop into. Make sure that they understand the lessons of good leadership, this is especially important with more talented employees. When talented people are not taught good habits and respectful leadership, their meteoric rise can end in disaster.
On the other hand, when they are led by someone who emphasizes to them the importance of how they conduct themselves, and how they treat other people within the business, your most talented players will also learn humility. You should always seek to lead by example.
Whenever you identify key talent within your organization, you should make retaining their skills a priority. When businesses don’t pay attention to their most important workers, those workers end up jumping ship for a company who appreciates them more. If you raise your talented workers the right way and nurture them appropriately, they will go on to be effective leaders.
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