3 Types of Employees You Seriously Need to Keep

With close to four out of five (78%) of business leaders ranking employee retention as important or urgent, it’s easy to understand why being able to identify who to keep is essential to nurturing and retaining the right employees in your organisation.

There are certain types of employee profiles that are essential to any organisation wanting to thrive and grow. Hence why the ability to recognise talent is pivotal in leading an effective employee retention program. Talent is an aptitude that makes someone special in a given context or domain. The concept of key talent further defines this notion by linking it to the success of an organisation’s strategy.

While the skills and competencies needed will vary from one organisation to another, there are three key talent profiles that any HR professional should aim to recognise, develop and retain amongst their staff.

Leaders

Leaders are a major strategic asset for any organisation wanting to succeed in business. Within a team, leaders are role models others want to follow. They inspire a common vision, bring direction, constantly challenge the way things are done, and motivate their colleagues to take action.

According to Dave Ulrich, only 20% of people are born natural leaders and another 20% would not be equipped with the necessary abilities to become good leaders. What about the remaining 60% you’ll ask? You’ll be glad to hear that they can become great leaders if provided with a well-structured framework and an adapted training.

HR professionals are often desperately seeking new leaders externally, but chances are that they already have one or more internally. All they need to do is identify those individuals that are either part of the first 20% or the other 60%, and determine how to develop their competencies to bring the best out of them.

Even though the task may seem intimidating at first, it’s pretty simple to execute once you have identified the people who would benefit from such training. Psychometric tests are a great tool to evaluate the personality traits that are innate to a person, enabling the identification of potential leaders within your organisation.

Challengers

Even though challengers might hold a scary or negative trait for some managers, they are many advantages to keeping them in your organisations – and this especially when they are well managed. A challenger is someone who constantly tries to push the boundaries, reconsidering processes, and voicing their opinions.

While they may take a bit more work to be convinced, their scepticism means that they will never fall in the common-thought bandwagon and will not be influenced by the HiPPOs (highest paid person’s opinion), may it even be their direct manager.

They are exceptionally good in negotiations. Their self-confidence and charisma means they will not hesitate to speak up when things are not right, helping to maintain an ethical spirit in the organisation and keeping management honest.

How you position a challenger in your organisation will make or break the success of their integration. The reality is, if they appear confrontational at first, it’s only to better a situation rather than to create imbalance or frustration around them.

Visionaries

Employees who are visionaries have the ability to make decisions based on what will happen in the future. They anticipate what seems unpredictable for most people. Often misunderstood, true visionaries do not base their intuition on subjective gut feelings as we could think.

Thanks to their capacity to envision their environment in a global manner, they can analyse independently the elements that compose it. Being a visionary is indeed a lot of work! Modern organisations are essentially complex systems, which are influenced by ever changing movements, and where a variety of interactions occur. People who are equipped with an open mind to change have the ability to leverage it, and secure an organisation’s future by developing viable solutions based on their calculated “feelings”.

Intuition being framed and conditioned means we’re far from dealing with crystal balls and psychics. In turn, this reveals the possibility for HR to develop a “visionary” profile to help recognise such talent during the recruitment phase and employee development process. Similarly to business leaders, individuals with the potential to become visionaries can be trained in order to improve their skills, and should therefore not be let go.