The Five Buckets
High performing cultures execute smartly in five equally important areas:
- Shrewd hiring
- Emotionally managed onboarding
- Talent Development
- Reward & Recognition
- Strategic Retention.
When hiring, high-impact talent is best found through top performer referrals. Stars know who fits and who doesn’t, but only recruit when they trust the organization.
Pitfalls include hiring biases and digital seine nets—such as inflexible personality exams and word-search resume software—and unfairly knock out many terrific talents. Knowledge can be taught and skills developed, but winning attributes build great cultures. Diverse talent sets, backgrounds, and perspectives help immensely.
Onboarding is where expectations are tested against experiences. When these align there is no surprise, and emotional equity will build. But when experiences differ from expectation, negative emotional reactions such as mistrust, doubt, and second-guessing creep in.
Since negative emotional conclusions thwart new hire engagement, a meticulous onboarding process should carefully monitor a positive emotional journey.
The third bucket—Talent Development—is vital because the three biggest reasons a skilled employee chooses to leave are:
- He or she is not growing.
- The boss.
- Money.
People who continually develop will fully engage and stay. People who get stale or bored will disengage and leave. Both outcomes are understandable, because impact talent has options. Talent Development injects emotional equity by investing in the person, and mitigates the number one flight risk.
Category four, Reward and Recognition, must be formal and informal, as well as fair, consistently administered, and timely.
And five, an aggressive, proactive approach to Strategic Retention, is hugely important to organizational stability. Turnover is expensive—costing anywhere from 6X-to-18X monthly salary and benefits depending on job complexity—so it is far cheaper to develop talent than reactively having to search, find, hire, and onboard someone, and then hope for the best.
When a culture is such that even the bosses are expected to grow, relationships strengthen. Morale, effort, communication, and trust improve. All of us are works in progress, and great cultures lead by example: Everyone is expected to grow.
Sustained excellence is never an accident. It is the byproduct of flawless, process-driven execution.
When you honor all five buckets—Hiring, Onboarding, Talent Development, Reward & Recognition, and Strategic Retention—they will honor you.
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