Why winning the "War for Talent" is a Pyrrhic Victory

Forbes has found that in company after company, when they ask the "Top Talent" about how retained they are, they get the following results:

More than 30% believe they’ll be working someplace else inside of 12 months.
More than 40% don’t respect the person they report to.
More than 50% say they have different values than their employer.
More than 60% don’t feel their career goals are aligned with the plans their employers have for them.
More than 70% don’t feel appreciated or valued by their employer.

But according to Forbes, all you need to do to retain top talent is to perform perfectly on 10 factors:

1. Unleash Their Passions: Smart companies align employee passions with corporate pursuits. Human nature makes it very difficult to walk away from areas of passion. Fail to understand this and you’ll unknowingly be encouraging employees to seek their passions elsewhere.

2. Challenge Their Intellect: Smart people don’t like to live in a dimly lit world of boredom. If you don’t challenge people’s minds, they’ll leave you for someone/someplace that will.

3. Engage Their Creativity: Great talent is wired to improve, enhance, and add value. They are built to change and innovate. They NEED to contribute by putting their fingerprints on design. Smart leaders don’t place people in boxes – they free them from boxes. What’s the use in having a racehorse if you don’t let them run?

4. Develop Their Skills: Leadership isn’t a destination – it’s a continuum. No matter how smart or talented a person is, there’s always room for growth, development, and continued maturation. If you place restrictions on a person’s ability to grow, they’ll leave you for someone who won’t.

5. Give Them A Voice: Talented people have good thoughts, ideas, insights, and observations. If you don’t listen to them, I can guarantee you someone else will.

6. Care: Sure, people come to work for a paycheck, but that’s not the only reason. In fact, many studies show it’s not even the most important reason. If you fail to care about people at a human level, at an emotional level, they’ll eventually leave you regardless of how much you pay them.

7. Lead: Businesses don’t fail, products don’t fail, projects don’t fail, and teams don’t fail – leaders fail. The best testament to the value of leadership is what happens in its absence – very little. If you fail to lead, your talent will seek leadership elsewhere.

8. Recognize Their Contributions: The best leaders don’t take credit – they give it. Failing to recognize the contributions of others is not only arrogant and disingenuous, but it’s as also just as good as asking them to leave.

9. Increase Their Responsibility: You cannot confine talent – try to do so and you’ll either devolve into mediocrity, or force your talent seek more fertile ground. People will gladly accept a huge workload as long as an increase in responsibility comes along with the performance and execution of said workload.

10. Keep Your Commitments: Promises made are worthless, but promises kept are invaluable. If you break trust with those you lead you will pay a very steep price.

Maybe - but according to my experience, its impossible to do all that with more than a very small number of people in a very large organisation, or for very long. Sooner or later you "increasing the responsibility" of Star Bod A conflicts with your plan for Star Bod B, and you can't "challenge their intellect and passion" when they all want to do the same high visibility, high status key tasks. Someone has to lose out eventually. Which is why you will always get the issue that 30% dont think they will be there in 12 months, and why any attempt to try and retain all the top talent, all the time is going to be fruitless.

Or as Pyrrhus (a far smarter man than he is usually given credit for) may have put it, "one more victory like this will break me".

But it won't stop the flood of learned articles telling businesses how they can all retain all their Top Talent - though you would have thought that if it was possible, everyone would (by now) know how and get on and be doing it, surely There is an entire industry of top talent retention gurus, strongly invested in top talent retention. What is far less convincingly tested is (i) the evidence that the Return on Investment is always so great (see banks, crashing of...) and (ii) that retention is even possible for many people over any reasonable time period.

Far more sensible to assume that you can't please everyone, all the time, assume that there will be attrition, and understand the cost/benefit of the productivity improvements top talent makes vs the costs of retention.