Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You

by Frances Frei

Once you’ve hired, developed, and promoted great people of all varieties, you now have to retain them. In today’s talent marketplace, this is often a significant challenge. The solution? Earn the right to keep your people, every single day. We recommend you start (stay with us here) by making lots of paranoid assumptions. Assume your competitors are looking at your inclusive, well-oiled talent machine as their own development pipeline. Assume your best people are getting calls from enthusiastic headhunters on a weekly, even daily, basis. (In our experience, African-American software engineers get called by recruiters at an average rate of every day.) Assume a few of them are feeling restless and/or some subset of the following: underchallenged, undervalued, underpaid, and underappreciated. Assume that someone put a great offer in front of them today, and they’re talking to their loved ones right now about the pros and cons of making the jump. Wake up every morning with a commitment to create the conditions where your employees aren’t even tempted to take that first call. That process is going to look different for every organization, but it always starts with open-hearted, open-minded inquiry into what’s getting in the way of everyone thriving, particularly the ones who are contributing the most. One of the things we like to do when we start working with companies is to sit down one-on-one with senior women and people of color and ask, “What does this organization need to ...