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How to attract and retain the best talent

If you had to start your company again tomorrow, would you enthusiastically rehire everyone on your team? Adrian Pickstock, a certified scaling up coach to CEOs and senior leadership teams, has the following useful advice.

When great talent is increasingly hard to find, figuring out how to attract and retain A players is quite probably the most important and difficult challenge leaders face to ensure company growth.

Highly engaged A players are driven by being part of a high-performance culture where their performance is measured, their success is recognised and where they are known to senior leaders.

Furthermore, A players need to understand the core purpose of the business and they need to be absolutely clear on how their hard work is contributing towards this higher purpose.

There are several ways of driving engagement and a key factor is ensuring all staff have visibility and are highly motivated by your long-term strategy – which should be intrinsically linked to your core purpose.

Of equal importance to hiring A players is their need to understand which levers they can pull to make a direct contribution to driving the business towards its goal.

With this clarity, A players will be motivated to get behind your medium and short-term plans with the knowledge they are contributing towards a goal that is ambitious, meaningful and is in line with their personal plan.

If until you have a team of A players with clear accountabilities and metrics your leadership team will continue to consume a tremendous amount of energy on trying to hire the right people, in the right positions – making it difficult to rather focus their attention on developing and executing the strategy necessary to drive real business growth.

Splash

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Comments

  1. And than you pay them low wages, or offer a poor work-life balance. Or even worse, you hire top talent and start telling them how to do their job.

    Hiring the A Players is the same a sales, you need to understand what makes them tick, and what is described in the article is only one side of the coin. In my humble opinion maybe even the least important side.

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