Tag: leadership development

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Team Leadership & Talent Retention

It’s easy to retain people. It’s not a big trick. Pay them fairly and well and they’ll hang around and do the work. HR specialists have mastered the skills of compensation. They can match your compensation structure to meet your organizational constraints, your organizational goals, the organizational personnel, and the resources the organization has available.

A rational economics approach to retention is straight forward. The problem is, at a certain point, a normative, psychological, approach may be even more important.

Sure, I can retain people with money, but that has a leveling effect. Retention through compensation does not guarantee commitment and personal investment. They’ll stay, but will they be committed and truly invested in your effort?

At a certain point, you’ve got to promise a bit more. Involvement, commitment, entrepreneurship, and risk taking requires not only an economic contract, but a social psychological contract.

That social psychological contract is created by leadership. Specifically, if you want to retain the entrepreneurs, the risk takers, the experts, and the great managers it will depend on your ability to lead. They will stay because they are recognized, engaged, challenged, developed, and optimistic.

You can retain zombies with money, but if you want to retain real organizational players, it’ll come down to the issue of your leadership.

Can you lead your team? Over and over again organizations debate the issue of retention by restructuring retention programs, playing around with the compensation systems, etc. But individuals do not necessarily stay because of the organization. They will stay for their team, they will stay for their team members, and they will stay for their team leaders.

Therefore the retention challenge is a team leadership challenge.

The better the leadership, especially at a group level, the greater the probability of retaining talent.

This is especially true in recent years. As the social contract between employees and their organization has broken down, it has been somewhat replaced by the personal, informal contract that emerges between employees, their teams, and their team leaders.

No longer is the sense of identity couched in the organization. Now it’s couched in teams. Employees speak of “my team” and “my group”; rarely do they speak of the organization with any sense of collective.

As such, team leadership training, which has always been an integral part in making organizations more innovative and creative, is also at the front line of talent retention.

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BLG Leadership Insights

Lessons Learned Through Verdi’s Stiffelio

Sometimes being innovative and being creative isn’t enough.  Sometimes you need persistence, luck, and fortitude—and more often than not, you just need to be in the right place at the right time. Just look at Verdi’s Stiffelio.

For the first time since its 1993 Metropolitan Opera debut, the Met presented Verdi’s seldom produced 1850 opera Stiffelio.  That it exists at all is something of a miracle, and that it turns out to be a terrific opera with a splendid if not absolutely top-tier Verdi score, is a delightful surprise.

Stiffelio did not begin life auspiciously.  Mid-19th century Catholic Italy was unprepared for a story (based on the play, Le Pasteur, ou L’évangile et le foyer) about a Protestant minister, Stiffelio, who divorces and then forgives his unfaithful wife.  The censors, despite Verdi’s will, insisted on changing Stiffelio into an orator and removing all biblical quotes and references–making the story dry and wringing the drama from the characters.

The premiere in Trieste was given a lukewarm reception, as were its subsequent performances, and Verdi asked that all copies of the score be destroyed.  A few years later, he reused much of the music in a new opera called Aroldo. While Aroldo was set in 13th century England and the title character was a crusader just returned from Palestine–it fared no better.

And that would have been the end of the story, had not bits and pieces of the score begun to surface in the 1960s, culminating in the discovery of an almost complete autograph of Stiffelio in 1992—upon which the Met production is based.

The Saturday matinee I attended was sold out and the cheers from the packed house would have probably continued until the evening performance—had the houselights not come up.  Tenor José Cura as the deeply conflicted title character, soprano Julianna Di Giacomo, his wife Lina, and baritone Andrzej Dobber, her father Stankar, headed a first-rate cast—all of whom sounded glorious and all of whom acted persuasively.  The great Met orchestra was ably led by the beloved tenor Plácido Domingo, who sang the role of Stiffelio when this production debuted 17 years ago.

That this opera is with us today proves that being proactive may entail putting something on the shelf for a while until it is rediscovered.

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BLG Leadership Insights

Don’t Kill Entrepreneurship with the Cost-Cutting Sword

One of the challenges in higher education is to rekindle or maybe even reformulate the entrepreneurial spirit.  The challenge that administrative and academic leadership faces is to create organizations with an entrepreneurial culture. Organizational leadership must become proactive and individuals must be rewarded for their proactive activities.

In an age of cost-cutting, where centralization has become the answer to the economic turbulence, the challenge for organizational leaders is to think about not what the organization will look like tomorrow morning, but what the organization will look like in the future.  In this context, there is much to be said about the creation of entrepreneurial venues within the university structure.

Universities and colleges must begin to think about how to reinvigorate the partnership with faculty and all members of the academic community.  Over the years, entrepreneurial efforts in the university context have been restricted to a few sectors or individuals at any given university.  The challenge is to ensure that the entrepreneurial spirit permeates the organization with reward and recognition.  This means that entrepreneurs should be rewarded and recognized.

Over the years university leadership has tended not to ask themselves what are the incentive mechanisms that will cause individual actors to innovate, share ideas, and take risks—not simply on their own behalf, but on behalf of the institution.  My fear is that in dealing with our current crisis, through restructuring and cost-cutting, universities like many other organizations, will stymie the risk-taking behavior that has been the backbone of entrepreneurship and success.  In crises like these, the issue is not simply to cut costs, but where to place the resource that will give return in the long run.

Leaders should remember not to kill entrepreneurship with the cost-cutting sword.

Picture Credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/whatwhat/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0