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Where are the people? Where did they go, how do we get them back, and how do we keep them? These questions continue to be major discussion points among senior leadership teams and boards of directors. A record 4.5 million people left their jobs as of November 2021 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). The Great Resignation has been blamed on burnout, low wages and desire for flexibility.
However, in my experience working with CEOs and senior executives, leaders either create companies where people want to work—or they don’t. If leaders focus on the 3Cs—Contribution, Connection and Commitment—they can create the conditions that retain talent, grow the organization and make it easier to adapt to change.
Contribution: Building a Strategy Roadmap
In the past 30 years, I have worked with clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to 15-person businesses, from manufacturing to high tech, from U.S.-based to global. These clients have something in common. The majority of their employees want to contribute to the success of a company—even if it’s not the company they are currently working for. They want to make a difference and feel acknowledged for it. Leaders can help with this by creating line of sight from an individual’s daily work to the overall goals of the company.
There are many of ways of doing this, but one that we have found to be very valuable is to engage people in building strategy roadmaps—the key strategic drivers for realizing a company’s vision over the next two to three years. A strategy roadmap is built from the future back and includes “what must be true” or “what has to happen when” in order to realize the aspiration at the core of the growth strategy. It guides all major efforts over that time period.
Strategy is not just the bailiwick of the CEO and executive team anymore. Engaging the top two to three levels of your organization in the strategic planning process is becoming the new normal. Building a strategy roadmap together allows people to “stand in the future” as a group and then build the path to achieve it. Being part of the planning, they become much clearer on how they contribute to the organization’s success.
One client we are working with, a family-owned manufacturing company, engaged their employees in building their first roadmap five years ago, going through the thinking process to figure out the key drivers of growth of their company and building a plan around that. Since then, they have seen their compound annual growth rate triple.
Connection: Recreating Interaction
The second factor is connection—or belonging. People want to feel they are part of something and that people care about them. As we all know, one of the biggest challenges we are facing in this virtual pandemic-laden world is helping people feel like they are still connected to each other and to the organization. The informal connections people make as they gather over lunch or in the hallways have been lost.
What does this mean for leaders?
The work of a leader is to be intentional about recreating those informal connections. While this is more challenging when people are working virtually, there are ways to do this.
For instance, we have used a platform called LexGo that creates a virtual office space where people are “in their offices,” and you can see they are there. Companies use it as a way of making it easier for people to drop in on each other and maintain those informal connections. We used it for a large group event of 150 people so they could move themselves around the conference and breakout rooms and speak to people before and during the meeting.
And not all solutions need to be technological. Creating connections can also be done by simply keeping meetings to 45 minutes so people can grab a virtual coffee with colleagues afterwards or create 10-minute check-ins with employees on a regular basis. At the end of the day, it will boil down to the commitment of each individual leader to make connecting with people informally a priority.
Commitment: Everyday Actions
Leaders that lead from commitment—holding yourself accountable for your promises—tend to have higher-performing organizations. Commitment-based leadership is the central tenet of high-performance organizations.
If you have a strong commitment around a worthwhile or compelling result, all the other elements needed to achieve that result will naturally evolve. A true commitment is demonstrated through everyday actions. For example, the actions many companies took during the pandemic showed their commitment to the safety of their employees. They went to extreme measures, and cost, to keep their employees safe. That demonstrated a commitment to their values in the face of hard times. A clear commitment:
- Provides stability during turbulence
- Allows one to declare breakdowns
- Provides the basis for coaching and being coached
- Is put into motion via declaration
- Is not a guarantee of results; rather, it drives extraordinary actions
A CEO who declared his company was going to double the size of business in a flat market knew the power of commitment. He made the commitment real by declaring it as a vision and goal. And then the senior team worked to see what breakthroughs were needed to achieve the result—and what mindsets and ways of thinking had to change. If members of the team took actions that seemed inconsistent with that commitment, it was discussed to ensure all action was aligned with the shared commitment.
Leading with Intention
Commitment-based leadership starts with high-performance practices around clear requests and committed responses. It seems simple, but when leaders are skilled at making clear requests of each other with clear time frames and conditions of satisfaction and have the discipline to get committed processes, performance soars. Time and time again, we have seen leaders that excel in these practices, and foster them in their teams, have higher levels of performance.
As a leader, if you find ways to help people see how they contribute to the success of the whole, are intentional about connecting with people informally and foster a commitment-based culture in your organization, you will thrive in any circumstance—pandemic or not. And those questions about “Where are the good people?” will live in the past and not be part of your current story because all of “those people” will be working for you.
Carolyn Hendrickson is CEO of Tandem Group, Inc., a firm that works with CEOs and senior executives to grow their businesses and their people. Tandem Group clients want to transform their companies into high performing organizations by aligning leaders on their growth strategy and ensuring they have the right talent and systems in place to achieve that growth, by adapting and changing over time.
