The Best Talent Wins

At a recent NY Report event, “Beyond Motivation: Ignite Your Employees and Watch Profits Grow,” sponsored by Empire BlueCross BlueShield, three business owners who’ve become experts in talent recruiting and retaining spoke about ways to inspire your team in a way that will lead to higher profits. Gretchen Shugart, CEO of TheaterMania; Chason Hecht, president of Retensa; and Jennifer Prosek, founder and CEO of CJP Communications and author of Army of Entrepreneurs; discussed a variety of strategies that helped them succeed in their own businesses, but the bottom line they all agreed on was that the company with the best talent wins every time. Here are three of the top tips discussed by the panel:

1. Make Your System the Star

Instead of looking to hire one or two superstar employees, look for ways to transform an entire staff of very good employees into superstars. “It’s really about making the system the star,” says Prosek. “In our case, that means identifying and implementing ways to take entrepreneurial-minded employees and make them even more owner-like.”

Hecht suggests constantly listening to employees. To do this, leaders should have structures in place to constantly gather feedback. “I personally lost my psychic ability years ago, and I don’t know many business owners who can read the minds of their staff, and fortunately you don’t have to,” says Hecht. “This is one population that really wants to tell you what they’re thinking and what they want.”

Hecht says one of the single biggest characteristics of high-performing organizations is constant communication, and annual performance reviews don’t cut it. Prosek took it a step further to say that annual reviews are like a “death knell.”

“I think annual reviews just suck,” says Prosek. “We started using 100-day plans and they have transformed our organization.” Employees sit down with their managers and build a 100-day plan. In three and a half months, the employees and managers sit down together again to determine the outcomes. “It’s green light, yellow light, red light,” says Prosek. “You did it, you didn’t do it, or it’s in progress. The plans are very outcome-based. They’re crafted by the manager and the employee, and they decide together what the priorities are, so there’s no guesswork. The employees can look at their own 100-day plans and basically give themselves a review.

2. Always be on the Hunt for Talent

All three panelists recommended starting a talent spotting program and meeting with new people regularly—even when you don’t have a position open in your company. The hiring process that happens in most companies is an employee gives two weeks’ notice, or a growth hire is needed, and the business scrambles to fill the position. By constantly talent spotting, you can take the time to really get to know potential candidates, so when a spot opens, you are excited to fill it with a qualified person you’ve been looking forward to working with.

“Whenever I meet someone, I listen very carefully to what excites them,” says Shugart. “I try to assess their values and their energy level and really see if they’re someone that I think is a good fit for us, so that when a position opens, we know where to go.”

It may be a time-consuming process, but the benefit to your company is well worth it. Hecht illustrated the point by explaining that, on average, an employee is a $300,000 investment, if you consider the cost of salary and benefits over the course of his or her tenure. “If I’m making a $300,000 investment, I’m not going to do that in two days,” says Hecht. “I know people who spend more time researching what phone to buy than they do looking at who to hire.”

3. Believe that People are the Solutions, not the Problem

Fundamentally, your people are going to solve whatever problem your company has or achieve any goals you have for your business. According to Hecht, one of the most common ways companies get employee management wrong is by thinking that employees don’t care, or that they’re not loyal, or that turnover is the cost of doing business. None of that is true. “As long as you believe that when you hire and develop and engage spectacular individuals, and individuals that fit, the problems will get worked out,” says Hecht. "Our job as management and leadership is helping our people succeed.”