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In a previous blog post, I predicted 2021 will be the year the high potential talent bubble will burst, and your companies will reactively scramble to keep their best people.

These high potential team members are currently running your organizations, expanding revenues, and leading efforts to modernize your business efforts.  In a year of countless challenges, these individuals were the problem solvers, the leaders, and the executors that saved the company.  Losing these individuals will cause costly delays, put accounts into jeopardy, and derail new initiatives.  And it is expensive, with the Society of Human Resource Management estimating it will take 200% of the high potential’s salary to replace them.  These leaders could be the current and future leaders of your organization, if you can keep them.

Don’t wait!  Be proactive in keeping your best talent and don’t risk it.  Here are 5 actions to take to bear hug your high potential talent so they will stay. 

1. Select your High Potential Talent:  As I speak with many organizations, they haven’t taken the time to identify their high potential talent by name.  Your classic HR leader will set up a 12-week project with an in-depth timeline and gnarly spreadsheets.  I instead encourage you to act fast.  Assemble your leadership team for one hour and create a list of 10 individuals that if lost, would create the biggest setback for the organization. 
2. Hire Executive Coaches:  High potential talent is motivated by personal growth.  Providing them with a one-on-one executive coach will reinforce your investment in them, provide them with a place to vent and process challenges, and enable them to grow as leaders.  The immediate results will be higher engagement and the longer-term results will be the leader of the future for the company.
3. Promote and Reward:  In these times of conservative budgets and eliminations of pay increases, I recommend a different strategy.  Decrease the total amount of money allocated to promotions and pay increases and focus them on the top 10 high potential talent.  If you need to replace these individuals, it will cost up to 200% of their salaries.  Or you can give them a pay bump now and reaffirm your support for them.
4. Focus on Inclusion:  A tactic to help a high potential to feel included at a company is to give them a seat at the table.  Invite them to strategy meetings and conduct one-on-one meetings more frequently with these individuals to ask their perspective.  These individuals are often workhorses.  Elevate them to strategic partners and they will feel included in the mission of the company. 
5. Prioritize and Resource:  Listen closely for the Exhausted Hero who subtlety asks for help prioritizing.  These are your drivers, so when they need help, they need help!  Sometimes priorities can’t shift, so also be prepared to provide additional resources in dollars or headcount to immediately help out.  Again, these are your best people so trust them when they say they need help.  If you don’t listen and act, they will act and go somewhere else!

Some of us bear hug as a constraint to keep someone in place.  The actions above bear hug the high potential talent so they WANT to stay in place.  If a high potential feels disrespected or unappreciated, there is nothing you can do to stop them from leaving.  It is amazing how much time HR departments reactively create counter offers to try to convince a high potential talent to stay. 

The best organizations focus on the five actions above to proactively ensure their high potential doesn’t want to leave.  Take action today!

In the year 2021, the high potential talent bubble will burst, and your best people will leave.  Unless you take action now!

Senior leaders and boards of every corporation in America will be sideswiped by these resignations.  These high potential team members are currently running your organizations, expanding revenues, and leading efforts to modernize your business efforts.  In a year of countless challenges, these individuals were the problem solvers, the leaders, and the executors that saved the company.  

Losing these individuals will cause costly delays, put accounts into jeopardy, and derail new initiatives.  And it is expensive, with the Society of Human Resource Management estimating it will take 200% of the high potential’s salary to replace them.  These leaders could be the current and future leaders of your organization, if you can keep them.

The secret to keeping high potential talent is to understand why the talent bubble has been created and why is it about to burst in 2021 driving record high potential talent turnover.

1. Low Resignations in 2020:  With the pandemic arriving suddenly in 2020, voluntary turnover or resignations quickly decreased.  High potentials were focused on retaining a paycheck.  As the world stabilizes this year, look for this pent-up bubble to explode and high potential talent will begin to look for new opportunities again.  If your resignations were down 50% in 2020, I predict they will be up 200% this year.
2. Exhausted Heroes:  2020 brought about very accelerated change!  Key decisions and workload including building work from home cultures, reinventing businesses to adjust to changes, and making challenging workforce decisions, were all placed on the shoulders of the high potentials with minimal resources.  They are just plain exhausted!
3. Delayed Recognition:  Executives are understandability pessimistic starting 2021.  Many companies are delaying pay increases, canceling bonuses, postponing leadership development, and cancelling annual award meetings.  After a year of high effort, these high potentials are seeing the lack of rewards as a lack of investment in them, and therefore driving disengagement. 
4. Inclusion Matters:  2020 also brought the importance of feeling included and respected to the forefront of organizations.  Your high potentials may not feel included because of their ethnic background, sexual orientation, age, marital status or political views.  The pent-up turnover of high potential talent will feel more empowered to find an organization where they feel included in 2021.
5. More Positions Available:  Executives and board of directors have used the pandemic to better evaluate their talent and many have determined they need to upgrade key leadership positions.  Applicants are no longer restricted to only apply locally as companies have embraced remote work, quadrupling the number of positions available to each high potential leader.  
6. Embracing New Beginnings:  Many high potentials have felt stuck in their jobs.  The new work from home experience will not be given up easily and the transition back to the office and back to commuting will be painful.  Leaders will look for new opportunities that work best for them.  As they try to defeat exhaustion and find balance, high potentials are feeling empowered to live their best lives.  And it is way easier to apply for a job when working from home!

It isn’t too late to avoid these six warning signs of the talent bubble bursting at your organization.  Companies can avoid losing valuable high potential talent by continuing promotions, hiring executive coaches, ensuring inclusion, and by giving these leaders a seat at the table.  These are not costly decisions when focused on those select, high potential individuals.  Listen to their concerns and take action immediately.  Take note of exhaustion, and help them to find balance through delegation, reprioritization, and providing them with the resources they need to be successful.  It is a new world and that world is calling your high potential talent away from you.   Take time to connect with your high potentials and take immediate action to let them know you want them to stay!

I had the pleasure of speaking with Andrew Baker on his podcast this week. The Corporate Exhausted Hero is real and hopefully our conversation will create lightbulb moments for listeners and inspire others to eliminate exhaustion from their work. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-andrew-baker-show/id1494102808?i=1000503222638

I had an awesome time speaking with my friend James about exhaustion in the workplace. Let’s find ways to minimize exhaustion by helping our leaders step more into a leadership role!

Click Here to view via Instagram

Through this crisis, many of us are feeling exhausted.  Many of us were exhausted before all of the major changes in our worlds.  It is time we fight back against exhaustion, whiles still driving the results that we hope to achieve.  It is possible to achieve it all, without doing it all!

It starts with talking about exhaustion with our bosses.  I spend a ton of time in executive coaching sessions helping people practice having these difficult conversations with their boss. Yes, it’s intimidating to have to say, “I need help to manage the role you think I’m doing. I’m not doing well. I’m struggling. I’m exhausted.” Those are not easy things to say out loud, particularly to our managers, but sometimes they need to be said. When a boss hears what you’re saying and is made aware of your feelings, they usually open up and try to help solve the problem.

This feels risky, and I won’t deny that the risk is real. But would you rather fail while struggling, or fail by asking for support? Bosses don’t want to see their direct reports struggle, and they certainly don’t want to see the projects struggle, either. So, when asked to help, more often than not, they’ll step in and step up.

I’ve coached a few individuals who’ve asked for that conversation and whose bosses effectively dismissed them with, “Just dig in and make it happen.” Nobody wants to work for a boss that isn’t going to support them, and usually within six months they end up leaving.

Others have a boss who understands the problem and help save their employee from exhaustion and eventual resignation.

There’s a theory that the increase in employee job-hopping has been trending because the recruiting market is so strong, and a recruiter can steal people away with just a little bit more money. I have a counter-theory: I think more folks are leaving their jobs because they’re not getting the support they need. Rather than initiating a hard conversation, it’s easier to just walk out the door—with a little increase in salary as the cherry on top. And the job-hopping continues as individuals find themselves in the Exhausted Hero trap again at the new company. The grass is not always greener!

I know what some executives are thinking as they read this: “Are they really exhausted?” Exactly! There is a difference between being tired and being exhausted. It is comparable to what athletes experience. A long-distance runner may get tired mid-race, so they walk through the water station to catch their breath—a short rest that gives them a new burst of energy to overcome being tired and keep running. Then there is the long-distance runner who leans to the side and struggles to lift one foot in front of the other. They are chronically exhausted and it will take a major intervention for the individual to recover.

Companies experience team member turnover when their employees are looking for more support, more balance, and more resources to aid them in doing their job. If companies focused on rescuing Exhausted Heros, they could save countless dollars in having to replace them.

“You have been a great individual contributor. Now you are a manager, so here are five direct reports—don’t screw them up.”

That is like telling a 16 year old, “you have been a passenger for 16 years, of course you know how to drive. Here are the keys!”

Manager’s need “driver’s ed” too so they can effectively drive their team forward

When I share this concept with leaders across Corporate America, they almost always smile and admit that this is the state of Leadership Development in more organizations. 

If we are going to rescue Corporate Exhausted Heroes and save the culture of work in America from being about exhaustion, we need our good managers to be developed intentionally through coaching and education.. If we fail to prepare them to handle their new assignments, we can’t  be surprised if they fall.

I am offering a Manager Playbook Workshop on Zoom to get managers the tools, tips, and templates they need to be successful. I am so passionate that managers need this training that I have discounted it through the rest of the year.

Stop suffering and get the training you need. Click here to learn more about the Manager Playbook Workshop!!

Click here to sign up:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/manager-playbook-workshop-virtual-lead-your-team-more-effectively-tickets-103469915302?aff=ebdssbonlinesearch

One Day Workshop Includes:

• Define Managing
• Effective one-on-ones
• Clarity through clear expectations
• Delegate to achieve more
• Build a plan of execution that works
• Give effective feedback
• Receive important feedback
• Recognize and grow excellence
• Tools and Templates and Tools and Templates!!

Workshop Description:

• Highly interactive Zoom course with breakout sessions
• Online workbook with templates and tools
• Limited class size to drive engagement

I define a “Corporate Exhausted Hero” as a leader who is trying to do it all, and just feeling exhausted.  This leader continues to be overwhelmed with individual contributor work, continues to try to manage and support their team, and spends their “spare time” setting the vision and influencing change.   The Corporate Exhausted Hero is really a fire fighter instead of a fire chief.

I call on all Corporate Exhausted Heroes to use this time to hit the reset button.  In a time when everyone is adjusting to working from home, working at a distance from their boss, and building new routines, it is a great time to build new procedures and expectations as a leader.

• Re-establish Goals:  Clear goals provide your team with the big picture direction and empowers them to deliver successful results.  Many Exhausted Heroes provide daily or weekly task lists to their teams.  Be a Strategic Manager and build clear goals for the month, quarter, or year and ask them how they want to meet their goals.
• Rebuild One-on-Ones:  Corporate Exhausted Heroes rely on reactive drive byes to get work down through their team.  This is a great time to hit the reset button on consistent One-on-Ones by establishing a clear agenda, focus on forward looking projects, and using the time to think together vs. the manager directing tasks.
• Delegation:  A leader needs to focus on what challenges are coming before they arrive.  This enables leaders to mobilize their teams for big fires, instead of running into the fire.  To focus on the future, you need to delegate the present.  Take time to review your to do list and identify who can take on tasks or become the captain on a group of tasks or project. 
• Take a Lunch:  Yes, it is possible, and it is healthy to take a break in the middle of the day.  Corporate Exhausted Heroes either eat at their desks or don’t eat at all.  In this new world where you are working in seclusion, take a lunch break every day.  Eat with your family, take the dog for a walk, or just sit on the back porch and eat.

Corporate Exhausted Heroes have a choice!  The exhaustion doesn’t have to be the way of life.  Take some time now to hit the reset button and aim to be a Strategic Manager focused on the future.  And if you need assistance or suggestions, shoot me an email at mheydt@gameplanleader.com. And look for my book, “Rescuing the Corporate Exhausted Hero” coming out later this year from Advantage/ForbesBooks.

Before an individual becomes an Exhausted Hero, they’re usually someone who’s excelled as a rock star. Their supervisor notices and gives them more responsibility. Then, at some point, as the responsibilities add up their team grows, and their personal growth stalls—due to lack of support or direction from leadership, lack of understanding on how to develop on their part, or both—and they’re unable to move on from being just a rock star. They’ll continue to do double-duty as manager and rock star, but it’s a struggle. And the struggle will continue. If they don’t develop into a strategic manager, then they risk burnout by functioning both as a rock star and as a manager.

We all know this individual. We may be an individual like this, struggling to balance it all. Always playing firefighter and never feeling like they have control of their work, this leader feels the pressure to be strategic, while feeling the pressure to deliver results, while feeling the guilt of the responsibility of being a people manager.

Symptoms include being the first person to work and the last one to leave. Gaining recognition for getting things accomplished—then rewarded with more projects. Running from meeting to meeting and never feeling like they are accomplishing anything. When they are in their office, they are quickly trying to manage their emails while dodging their employees who often stop by with questions. The reason they come in early and leave late is that is the only time they are not bothered and can get their work done. And they are the individuals that senior leaders trust with all the big projects so their workload continues to be over capacity.  These individuals feel stuck and don’t feel there is a choice of another way…but there is another way.

If you are an Exhausted Hero, it isn’t too late.  Hire an executive coach to assist you in improving key leadership behaviors like creating a vision, influencing change, or coaching.  Or work with an executive coach to learn more ways to delegate effectively. Or if you are part of an organization that has an exhausted culture involving countless Exhausted Heros, let me know!  I would love to come facilitate a workshop to assist in elevating the culture.