How to motivate and retain top performers if you can’t promote them?
It’s a management headache. You have a fantastic member of your team and they’re a top performer but, how do you keep them motivated if you can’t promote them?
There will be times where an organisation simply can’t give a promotion and in this case the risk is you are unable to retain them.
So, what can you do to keep top talent motivated and retain them?
- Whilst they may be a top performer, there may be certain skills or experience gaps holding them back. As a manager, it’s your responsibility to identify these gaps, provide the feedback, and put strategies in place to help develop your colleague. This gives the employee something to work towards, keeping them motivated and interested. The caveat here is there must be a reward should the employee close the skill gap and demonstrate all the required skills for the promotion.
- Have you dug into the motivations of your colleague? What is really motivating them to progress? There are a host of reasons for this including, status, financial rewards, the opportunity to manage others etc. You may be surprised by their motivation and it may differ from what you assumed. It could be they’d like a pay rise as they want to move house, for example.
- If the motivation is linked to people management, are there ways you can give them a lead role on a project, assist with future recruitment, or coaching more junior employees? By understanding the intrinsic motivations, you can attempt to put strategies in place to satisfy them. Without asking the question, you’ll never know!
- It’s sometimes easy to forget to praise top performers. It’s common for managers to focus on improving the performance of those employees who are not performing as well, forgetting to praise the employees who are really excelling. Everyone likes to be praised and feel they are doing a good job.
Keeping employees motivated will always be a challenge, but by keeping an open dialogue and giving constant feedback, there will be ways to retain and motivated top performers. That said, you have to be realistic that ambitious people will not hang around forever waiting to be promoted. The reality is you may not be able to offer what they want, in which case the inevitable will happen and they will move on.
Creating a culture of openness and transparency is essential to retaining and motivating top performers. By encouraging open conversation, you’ll have a more strategic approach to helping your top performers. A one-size all approach will certainly not work!
To discuss the above further, or to get more details on retention strategies, please get in touch with us!