Page 111 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Getting Great People on Board 101

tinely, you can work with colleagues to trade good people or just
champion some of your people for open positions. Some leaders
hesitate to do this because they fear losing good people from their
team, but if you don’t actively help them find new opportunities,
the best people will do it on their own, and you might lose them
from the organization completely. The other advantage of actively
helping your people move is that you will then have a network of
former team members throughout the organization who can col-
laborate with you and support you in the future.

While all these approaches to development sound straightforward and
sensible, many leaders still hesitate to act on them. After all, it takes work,
time, and money to develop people, and if you do a really good job, the per-
son might still go to another team or another company anyway where they
can get more money or responsibility. Great people will always have other
opportunities. So why should we make the investment and watch someone
else reap the returns?
Unfortunately, there is no easy answer to this question. Great lead-
ers, however, understand that it is ultimately less expensive and far more
effective to develop their own talent than to constantly bring in outsiders
who will need to go through a learning curve and who might not work out
in the end. Internal people usually have a far greater chance of success and
become productive much more quickly. So in the long run, developing
talent will pay off many times over, both in productivity and in reinforcing
the social contract of your organization.

Sharing your incentives philosophy

Not all people are alike. They have different motivations for coming to
work and different long-term career aspirations. At the same time, the ac-
tual work that they do is not always comparable. So how do you reward
everyone for their performance in a way that they feel is fair and equitable,
and that attracts, retains, and develops the kind of talent you need—and
doesn’t break the bank? Questions of incentives always get to the heart of