Business Management ABCs

Developing Key Employees – A Win-Win Situation

We all value our key employees and understand the contribution they make to the organization, based on their current talent and skills set. They possess these desirable qualities:

� Self-motivated

� Interested in personal and professional growth

� Driven to succeed

� Feel compelled to share their knowledge with others

� They seek answers and solutions where problems exist

Unfortunately, these are precisely the type of people who get bored easily and who are always seeking to broaden their knowledge base. How do you keep them engaged and make it possible for them to grow?

Involvement: I find that roundtable discussions with the entire team helps provide a momentum for creative ideas regarding the department’s (and the company’s) current and future projects and strategies. As a manager, one is sometimes unaware that their employees actually may give considerable thought to innovation and team building. If you have an open-door policy and make it a habit to have informal chats with your people – as a team and one-on-one — on an ongoing basis, you will get some interesting and sometimes valuable input.

Growth: Ongoing training will benefit both the employee and the organization, by opening up new pathways for revenue building and/or cost reduction via new technology and ideas.

Challenges: It is a fact of human nature that the higher the expectations you have of someone, the greater is the possibility that they will meet them. One of the best experiences in my own career was to have a manager who gave me many opportunities to exceed the duties required by my job description. Of course, this can backfire if you too often assign projects that are clearly beyond the experience or capabilities of an employee. So we need to be careful that we are dealing with someone who is able to rise to the task.

Communication: It’s important to keep the channels of communication open so that you can identify what employees are experiencing in relation to their performance. Are they ready to take on more responsibility? Are they hungry for something a bit more exciting than the same day-to-day activities? Are they willing to explore new possibilities, or are they stuck in a grind that they cannot seem to get out of without going to another company? At one time, I was wondering if I would ever be able to advance to another level at my company, and I asked my manager about this. His reply was that I was so good in my current position, that my department was one that always met schedules and never had any political issues; it was unlikely that they could see any profit by advancing me. He suggested that the best way for me to “get ahead” was to leave the company and find the position I wanted somewhere else. What saved me from doing exactly that was a reorganization that left me reporting to someone else with very different ideas. Things do not always play out that way, however, and your employee may be thinking of leaving in the near future, because that is the only path they see for growth.

Be sure to visit my blog for more articles like this. Leadership Fundamentals.