May HBR: Keeping Top Talent

“How to Keep Your Top Talent” (by Martin and Conrad Scmidt). This article starts off with some sobering stats about “high potential” employees:

--Nearly 40% of internal job moves involving high potentials end in failure;
--1 in 3 high-potentials admits to not putting all her/his effort into the job;
--1 in 4 believes s/he will be working for another employer in a year; and,
--1 in 5 believer his/her personal aspirations are quite different from what the organization has planned for him/her.

So what to do? The authors have identified 10 Critical Components of a Talent-Development Program. Here are just a few: 1) Explicitly test candidates in three dimensions: ability, engagement, and aspirations; 2) Forget rote functional rotations; place young (high-potential) leaders in intense assignments with precisely described development challenges; and, 3) Create individual development plans: link personal objectives to the company’s plans for growth, rather than to generic competency models. Read the rest to avoid losing your best and brightest to the competition.