25 Ways to Develop Your Stars and Keep Them!

Written by Marcia Zidle | Edited by Rory Hart
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    Do you have exceptional performers on your team? If you do, it can be a wonderful gift to have people who you can count on to get the right results; who thins about what else needs to be done without being told; who are always asking to do more.

    You Don’t Want to Lose Them!

    One cost-effective retention strategy is to stretch and challenge them. It’s not necessary to change someone’s job to build capabilities. The Center for Creative Leadership has generated developmental challenges that add professional and leadership opportunities to a person’s present job. These challenges will either:

    • Require working with new people or high variety or time pressures.
    • Call for influencing people with no or limited direct authority or control.
    • Demand a “take charge” attitude that can lead to obvious success or failure.
    • Involve building a team, starting something from scratch or solving a problem.

    Three Types of Opportunities
    Pick and choose the ones that “fit” your people, your company and your budget.

    A. Small projects and start–ups:
    They offer learning on the run, dealing with time pressures and dealing with groups not worked with before.

    1. Be part of a task force on a pressing business problem
    2. Handle a negotiation with a customer
    3. Integrate systems across units
    4. Supervise product, program, equipment or systems purchase
    5. Go to college campus as a recruiter
    6. Present a proposal to top management
    7. Work short periods in other units
    8. Serve on a new project / product review committee
    9. Plan an off-site meeting, conference, etc.
    10. Manage the visit of a VIP
    11. Go off-site to troubleshoot problems
    12. Be part of the company’s trade show booth team
    13. Do a project with another function

    B. Small scope jumps and fix-its:
    They offer team building, taking responsibility, developing subordinates and dealing with time pressures.

    14. Manage ad hoc group of inexperienced people
    15. Supervise cost-cutting
    16. Design new, simpler effectiveness measures
    17. Assign to work on something they hate to do
    18. Manage ad hoc group of former peers
    19. Assign a project with a tight deadline

    C. Small strategic assignments:
    They offer developing influence skills and coping with uncertain situations with little control and few rules.

    20. Spend a week with customers; write a report
    21. Do postmortem on a failed project
    22. Evaluate the impact of training
    23. Write a speech for someone higher in the organization
    24. Write a proposal for a new system, product, etc.
    25. Interview outsiders on their view of the organization

    Management Success Tip:

    A paycheck is what helps people get to sleep at night, not what gets them going in the morning. It motivates employees to an extend. But for your stars they need more,. Remember help them to grow or out they go! Also see How Not to Motivate Your Best and Brightest

    Which two or three “fit” your people, your company and your budget? Do you have others to add? Reply below.

    Do you want to develop your Management Smarts?

    Marcia Zidle