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Talent Management Best Practice 4 – Know Your Artificial Employment Retainers

golden handcuffsEvery manager should seek to know the stay/leave propensity of his or her subordinates and certainly that of top performers. While true knowledge of others’ intentions is unknowable and unpredictable opportunities arise, there are artificial retention mechanisms and observable signs that together suggest an individual’s inclination. Recognizing these signs and factoring them into an assessment of employee loss risk is important to a manager’s ability to retain top talent.


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About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

Business Communications Best Practice 4 – Limit Expanding Ambiguity

StrategyDriven Business Communications Article | Growing UncertaintyWe’re familiar with the childhood game where a verbal message is shared child-to-child around a seated circle and the last person in the chain hears a message completely different than the original oration. We experience this same expanding ambiguity in our business communications. These, however, are not a game and the differences can greatly impact the bottom line. Consequently, the question becomes why do our communications morph and how can these changes be limited?


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About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

Organizational Accountability Warning Flag 3 – Artificial Retainer Driven Complacency

StrategyDriven Organizational Accountability Warning Flag Article“The wheel that does the squeaking is the one that gets the grease.”

Josh Billings (1818 – 1885)
American humorist

It’s a natural human tendency to seek the path of least resistance. For executives, managers, and supervisors, this practice translates into assigning the difficult and emergent work activities to top performers, diverting work away from under-performers, and avoiding employee confrontations. The latter action erodes accountability. Leaders who do not address the shortcomings of under-performers including the provision of overly positive (even if neutral) feedback and unearned rewards (relative to top performers) loudly proclaim the merits of non-performance. Continued high performance and retention of top talent reinforces these errant practices until one day the lack of accountability drives the company’s best employees to a competitor’s business.


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Additional Information

Additional information regarding artificial employment restraints and how individuals can overcome them is contained within the StrategyDriven Professional Development article, Artificial Employment Restraints.

Recommended Resources – The Complete Executive

The Complete Executive: The 10-Step System for Great Leadership Performance

by Karen Wright

About the Book

The Complete Executive: The 10-Step System for Great Leadership Performance by Karen Wright provides actionable insights to developing the habits and practices necessary to succeed in high-level leadership positions. Karen organized her insights into ten topical collections covering:

  • Health and fitness
  • Life plan
  • Relationships
  • Being a leader
  • Business basics
  • Career plan
  • Network
  • Learning and growth
  • Fun and interests
  • Reflection

Taken together, these collections focus on helping senior leaders create for themselves a life that fully supports health, stamina, reputation, skills, and relationships.

The Complete Executive closes with a 100-point self-assessment that enables readers to discover the areas of development requiring the most attention.

Benefits of Reading and Using this Book

StrategyDriven Contributors like The Complete Executive because of its immediately actionable recommendations to building ‘the whole executive.’ Whereas most books focus on just one aspect of leadership or restrict themselves to ‘the office,’ Karen goes beyond the confines of corporate life to address the wellbeing of the whole person. She recognizes that success does not begin or end within the office but is rather a result of the whole of a person’s life.

We found The Complete Executive to be an easy read; each insight accompanied by real world observations that highlighted the importance of the practice without being overly prescriptive or drawn out. As such, we believe Karen’s book would make a great compliment to any leadership development program, particularly one in which a key leadership principle is focused on each week.

The Complete Executive echoes many of the principles espoused by StrategyDriven and the StrategyDriven Professional websites; making it a StrategyDriven recommended read.

Corporate Cultures – Why Policies Don’t Match Actions

Policy - Action MismatchToo often, corporate policies are the ‘little white lies’ no one likes to talk about. Philosophically, corporate policies should reflect the expectations of company leaders and drive management’s decisions and employee actions. Upon closer examination, however, management’s decisions and employee actions are anything but aligned with documented expectations; with few seemingly concerned about the discrepancy.


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