Give employees room to grow
There’s one final step beyond just talking with and giving feedback to people about their career aspirations: using that to give them room to grow.
“There are three critical components to any job,” Kelly says. “First and foremost is interest in what you’re doing, second is compensation — and when I talk about compensation it’s being treated fairly — statistics show only 30 percent of people leave for higher compensation. The third and the most important is learning.”
Kelly has people come to the firm all the time looking for a new job, but they don’t realize it’s not their job that’s bothering them, it’s their stalled learning process.
“Individuals come to us at the senior level, when their learning curve flattens out, and they’re bored,” he says. “They usually blame the company, so they move jobs, and they find it’s great for six months, but then they’re doing the exact same thing. So how do you create a learning culture in an organization and how do you continue to push people’s intellect to have them nurture that piece of the equation?”
The answer is taking a proactive approach to the problem by adding new learning pieces to people’s existing roles.
“We implemented a training and development organization, which focuses on development,” Kelly says. “We assess people, we give them new opportunities for moving around the globe, we take some of our best people and put them around the globe to continue with their learning curve.”
That has given several people at the company a new lease on their careers.
“We just sent three people to Asia Pacific to capture the market there, and they helped carry the baton in terms of corporate culture,” he says. “They develop themselves as individuals, plus the cultural component that I talked about because they get a chance to show they could be future leaders in the firm.”
That international element works at Heidrick & Struggles, but not every company has that capability. Kelly’s main point is that, as CEO, you have to figure out what new elements people can add to their job by taking points from those conversations on what they want to do to give them a bit of growth. Those little extras can help drive retention, set a management example and grow your company.
Heidrick & Struggles has certainly seen the boom from having happy employees, pushing revenue to more than $648 million in 2007, up more than $146 million from 2006. And, again, Kelly’s not being a know-it-all, but he thinks his company culture played a role in that.
“Culture is critical to the success of an organization, particularly a culture where you want to have fun and learning, and statistics show that organizations where corporate culture is high are 20 percent more productive than their direct competitors,” he says. “So there’s a correlation between having a great corporate culture and revenue and profit, and that’s why I’m a huge advocate of it.”
HOW TO REACH: Heidrick & Struggles International Inc., (312) 496-1200 or www.heidrick.com
