Managing your senior and Experienced Employees…
Managing senior and experience employees – the real wealth of your organization is not an easy task for any business leader or head of the organization. And if not managed properly, efficiently and cleverly, this can not only be costly but also slow down the growth of an organization and will affect the reputation and brand of the organization in industry. We all have seen so many examples to this effect.
From my experience, I am of the opinion that your senior and experienced employees (those with more than 10 years of experience) are not looking for more industry experiences or technical expertise…they have already gained that. They are also not looking for very huge salary hikes…but something to match with their experience and expertise). At the stage where they are they certainly look for challenges; they look for turn-around; they work as Change Agent; they look for something that they can be really proud of…creating an organization; being a part of growing organization. For this they look for vision of the organization, leadership style of the head of the organization…the scale and magnitude by which the company has grown in last 5-6 years and scale and magnitude by which the company is planning to grow in next 5-6 years.
With this background…I question is for all those heads that are in the role of managing experienced, talented and senior employees of their organization:
1) What do you do to retain those employees?
2) How do you challenge them?
3) What do you do to motivate them?
4) Are there any other challenge or issue involving senior employees that you would like to share?
Kindly share your thoughts and experiences.
This is a part of my research study and your inputs will be duly recorded and absolute credit will be given to you.
You can also email to me at sanjeev.himachali@gmail.com .
Thanks and Regards,
Sanjeev
Good Answers (3)
Bob M.
Principal at Elite Leadership Solutions
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Hi, Sanjeev.
I echo the thoughts above for questions 1, 2 & 3. The best way to challenge, motivate and ultimately retain these employees is to get to know them. Then you can find out what motivates them. Once you know this, you can offer them the opportunities that stimulate them.
4) Other challenges
Senior employees have used a certain set of skills to get to where they are. They have become comfortable executing their current tasks. Then something changes. It could be the industry, competition, technology, the composition of the labor force or many other things. Often a senior person will try to handle this “problem” just like all the other problems they have handled in the past.
Conceptually, I see this as forcing the problem into their existing comfort zone. They address this new situation with the same type of thinking and the same tools that they used in the past. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t, depending on the nature of the problem.
The challenge for them is to evaluate the basic nature of the new situation to see if it is the same as previous challenges or not. If it is different, what new approaches, attitudes, tools or expertise are needed to grapple with this change? Senior people tend to be a confident lot. Many of them do not stop to consider that maybe they need more or different capabilities than they currently have. They take action based on the tools they currently possess. Others do stop to consider the situation. They recognize it as being out side of their current expertise. They gather the appropriate people. They learn and develop the necessary attitudes, skills and tools. These people take the appropriate action based on what the situation requires.
Conceptually, I consider this to be expanding their comfort zone to include the new situation. They are willing to deal with the discomfort of being out of their comfort zone until they master the new tools.
This issue is becoming more critical as the pace and magnitude of change rapidly increases. Internet economy, social networking, virtual workforce, worldwide supply markets, economies flattening, print media shrinking, changing workforce demographics, etc. The established way of thinking and taking action just won’t be effective as we move forward.
Hope this helps your research study!
Regards,
Bob
Chris R.
IT Service Delivery Artist specializing in technology solutions for Small Business and CBOs.
Best Answers in: Quality Management and Standards (1)
Here are my thoughts:
Q1) What do you do to retain those employees?
This can be something different for each person in your organization. If you have brought the right group of people together then you will quite likely have a group of diverse personalities and very different motivations. As an executive, you will need to understand your top people. At this level, there is no silver bullet answer. You need to do some work to retain your top talent.
Q2) How do you challenge them?
Again, this depends on the individual. Very often in business we try to run everything with textbook processes and forget the human aspect. The idea that "people our our most valuable resource" is tossed around and more often than not there is no sincerity behind it. If you want to know how to challenge your senior staff, take time to get to know them. Learn their interests and passions then find a way to tie your business to their passion.
Q3) What do you do to motivate them?
This goes hand in hand with challenging your team. At the senior level, your team needs to be able to be self motivating but as the executive you need to provide the catalyst. Often executives talk about setting direction and they do so quite well. This might work to help motivate the more junior group by giving them something to work toward. Your senior managers need more than direction, they need a destination. There is a HUGE difference between the two.
Q4) Are there any other challenge or issue involving senior employees that you would like to share?
One challenge that I have found is getting all of the senior management on the same page. It seems natural for senior managers to want to "build their own empire" within your organization. Empire building can be motivating to individual managers because they feel that they are gaining personal power. More often than not this holds an organization back from reaching the common destination or goal. At some point the needs of the organization will conflict with the needs of the internal empire and this will end up turning a trusted senior manager against the organization. My advice? Do not tolerate empire building.
Don't loose sight of the "people" aspect of business. Use clear language and a human voice rather than the typical business catch phrases and excessive language. Speaking to your senior managers in a human voice will help to build trust and respect.
I hope that helps.
Aletta M.
Assessment Specialist at First National Bank, South Africa
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“Retain” has two meanings: “to hold or keep in possession” and “to engage the services of”.
The traditional focus in many HR practices has been to hold or keep rather than to engage a service. High-value employees and hot skills want to be “engaged” and not “kept”. (You keep your pets)
Companies need to shift their thinking and focus what they need to do to help these employees become fully engaged in the organisation.
Key staff should be retained through exceptional levels of leadership, business and personal growth, travel and training opportunities, and general excitement regarding the future of the company. In this regard it is extremely important that mentoring, succession and career planning are a key focus of any retention plan.
Focus on the - Develop-Deploy-Connect Model - When this happens, the attraction and retention of skilled talent largely take care of themselves
More Answers (4)
Hi Sajeev
Though you have addressed this question to those who are in the role of managing experienced, talented and senior employees, I still thought I would share my thoughts probably could be of help. Though I have had the experience of handling fairly senior employees of about 10+ years experience, but not had such an intense experience with very senior employees with over 20 yrs of experience or so.
As you rightly said, the factors mentioned by you rarely motivate these kind of employees. They are more driven by the challenges, learning and the respect they expect for their talent and experience. This is where most of the senior leadership fails. They rarely differentiate and trust these employees with wisdom. Then they end up breathing over shoulder which is disliked by these employees. This leads to a vicious circle of trustlessness leading to more vigilance and eventual separation.
In my own experience, when dealing with senior employees, the first thing one must assess is the kind of experience and the role they are expected to perform. It MUST not be a square peg in a round hole fitment.Having ensured this, one must leave them on their own, just stating what outcomes/results are expected, leaving the "how" to them. Broadly one can state that any method is acceptable as long as it is not illegal, unethical or unprofessional. However one must be "aware" of how things are going on and 'not' watch with lens. Keep the accountability to the results and ensure fairness is maintained at all costs with the people in general. Empowerment should be in 'deed' and not only in words. Adopting the attitude ..."you have all the freedom and power to operate and decide as long as you check with me..." will not work in long term. Leave the discretion of what to check with you and what not, to the senior employee himself. Never ever try to show 'postmortem wisdom' as it rarely motivates. Postmortem is always easier than surgery. The key factor in getting the senior and experienced employees to your side I feel is "TRUST" and "EMPOWERMENT". But "where" to put these two is the moot point and that is where your leadership acumen as a business head or promoter is tested.
In Mahabharat, Krishna offered himself without a single weapon to one side and the entire Yadava armed forces to the other side when Arjun and Duyodhan came to seek help in the battle. Arjun opted for unarmed Krishna while Duryodhan opted for the entire Yadava forces with a scorn and criticism for Arjun for making such a stupid choice. What happended eventually is a known fact.
I hope this response helped you and all the best for your research work.
Best Regards,
Anand.K
Bangalore-76
i would like share someting on survey,
Generally we called empoyee empowerment ,Empowerment refers to enlargement of an employee’s job responsibility by giving him the authority of decision making about his own job without approval of his immediate supervisor. Empowerment is the degree of responsibility and authority given to an employee. By empowerment, the employees are supported and encouraged to utilize their skills, abilities and creativity by accepting accountability for their work. Empowerment occurs when employees provided with all the relevant information and the best possible tools, fully involved in key decisions, and are fairly rewarded.
Wagner V.
em transição de carreira
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Hi ! Sanjeev,
To lead a senior guy it is necessary to trust that experienced professional and share the strategy with him and never dictate an order mainly if the order is wrong. Go by results, never by task. Pay the guy properly giving him a consultant position. Never to give stupid excuses to fire him. Never give him blue-collar intelectual work.
My best regards,
Wagner
Working with seniors is always a pain. The biggest problem is the ego that these seniors carry and no body but themselves can help it. The best way to achieve this would be to keep the senior roles different from each other and any clashes should be avoided.
The best way to keep a manager / senior working with you is appreciate their team and their effort. Any senior would always love his / her team and keeping their teams happy at times becomes the key, especially in India. Periodic awards / recognition is always helpful.
Other than monetary benefits, Seniors always like to get freebies, like a Company fleet pick and drop facilities for example. Motivation is a tough job because these seniors almost know all tricks that are used to motivate them and play them down.
