Strategy #37: Give everyone the job title of CRO (Chief Retention Officer), beginning with yourself

One of the best retention strategies an organization can implement is a recovery program to salvage employees who are considering leaving. At Cypress Semiconductor, a high tech Silicon Valley company, CEO T.J. Rodgers insists that any time a key employee submits a resignation, he is to be interrupted from whatever he is doing (even if it’s a board meeting). He wants to meet with that employee immediately and see what can be done to turn the situation around (as reported in his book No Excuses Management).

This sends a powerful message throughout the organization that people really are the most important resource. People often leave for non-monetary reasons that can be addressed immediately and satisfactorily. Treating potential defections with a great sense of urgency can help you keep your best people (but the strategy will backfire if you do not religiously keep any promises made in the process).

Why don’t you give everyone in the organization a new job title: Chief Retention Officer.  If everyone took this upon themselves, whatever their official job title happens to be, your recruiting and retention challenges would be easier to manage. As a chief retention officer, you can play a role analogous to the manager in a boxer’s corner during a prize fight. If your fighter has taken a pounding in the round just ended, he doesn’t need you hovering over his stool at the break telling him what an idiot he is, which is the approach all too many managers take in dealing with subordinate failure in their organizations. A good boxing manager does two things in the brief time he has before the fight resumes. First, he gives his fighter technical advice on how to avoid getting beat up again, and hopefully to turn the tables on the opponent. Second, he gives him the confidence that he can do it. In a caring organization, many people play this role – helping to pick people up when they fall down, supporting them when they are struggling.

The Gallup organization has conducted extensive research on the factors that foster high employee satisfaction and thus engender loyalty. One of the most important variables (and to many managers who hear this for the first time, one of the most surprising) is the feeling that they have “a best friend” at work. Isn’t that one of the key roles of a best friend? To pick you up when you feel like you’ve been knocked down?  And if a best friend is not around, then a CRO can fill in!

A Great Idea:  If you are going to deputize people to serve as Chief Retention Officers, you should also provide them with supporting resources. One hospital that I worked with was in a highly competitive marketplace, and was spending way too much money on temporary nursing staff. One of the actions we took was that I recorded an audio CD entitled Before You Leave (B4U Leave). The idea was that any time we learned that someone was contemplating leaving, or that they had already submitted their resignation, they were given a copy of the CD.

On the recording, I did not ask them to stay, but merely to evaluate whether they were making a decision that was truly founded on values, using The Twelve Core Action Values as a template, by asking them to think about a series of tough questions. For example, I asked if  they were running away from problems because it was easier than facing up to them (Courage is Core Action Value #2). You can do the same thing.  Create appropriate resources to help people make sure that they are not making a mistake that they’ll come to regret.

As part of their “customer service” programs, some organizations have instituted service recovery teams – which are tasked with turning around unfortunate experiences so that disgruntled customers are transformed into raving fans. But how much more important is it to “recover” good people who are about to leave for another organization – perhaps even the competition? What tools can you develop for your CRO employee recovery team?

“Leaders of successful organizations make sure their followers are proud to be part of the company.  For this to happen, the followers as individuals, and the organization as a whole, must have values in common.”

Larry R. Donnithorne: The West Point Way of Leadership

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