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Succession Planning

Published February 2007

Retaining Young Managers

 

  David Austin

At this moment, it's likely there is a group of well-educated, highly motivated and talented young managers giving 110 percent to make a significant, positive impact on your business. These young professionals are the lifeblood of your organization — and your pipeline for future leaders.

Yet, despite the best of corporate intentions, most companies still do a miserable job of retaining young professionals. According to the most recent information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average tenure of employees age 25 to 34 is only 2.9 years. Stated another way, you can expect today's 25-year-olds to change jobs at least three times during their first 10 years in the workforce. This is an expensive problem that affects every industry — the Saratoga Institute estimates the cost of turnover is anywhere between half and three times a person's salary.

Counteracting employee churn requires talent managers to understand that employees, particularly young managers, leave for many reasons other than salary or opportunity elsewhere. In "The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave," Leigh Branham analyzed years of data from the Saratoga Institute to develop the following reasons why employees leave:

1.    The job or workplace wasn't as expected.
2.    There was a mismatch between the job and the employee.
3.    The employee is receiving too little coaching and feedback.
4.    The employee has too few growth and advancement opportunities.
5.    The employee feels devalued and unrecognized.
6.    The employee is stressed from overwork and work-life imbalance.
7.    The employee loses trust and confidence in senior leaders.

As business professionals faced with improving talent management strategies and tactics, you intuitively recognize that as a new generation begins to enter the workforce in full stride, employers will need to find ways to build opportunities for growth into their business and culture to remain competitive. With this in mind, there are several strategic and operational measures based on technology that can — and should — be taken to make a positive impact on retention efforts.

Keep up the pace

The pace of change and volume of information flow is faster than ever. The good news is your young managers already are acclimated to this environment and are used to managing the chaos. The Internet has helped foster an insatiable appetite for information, and corporate enterprise needs to recognize this. The new-generation managers will not respond as their predecessors did to passive knowledge sharing or static onboarding techniques that overlook the need for dynamic self-discovery and action learning.

Get them engaged

New managers often join companies with great enthusiasm for their newly cast roles. They're excited they've been hired to do a job, and they think the company has placed great trust in them to execute. Unfortunately, Day 1 is often the zenith of employees' enthusiasm for their new employer. Detailed information about their role, the processes and tasks for which they are responsible, as well as directions on where to dive in, typically are lacking.