The B.I.G. Secret You Should Know About Retaining Top Talent

3 Tips to Inspire Your Team During Meetings

When your team comes in on Monday morning and sits down at their desks, do they really want to be there?

A great leader can truly make a difference by inspiring their team to find the connection between their passions, talent or ambitions and the company’s mission.

Are they just collecting a paycheck?

For some, the projects they are working on aren’t exciting, the paycheck is lower than they deserve, or the company they work for is not a Fortune 500. As a result of these factors, they become disengaged, coming to the office every day just to collect a paycheck.

But these factors are excuses — not reasons — for being disengaged.

The real problem is these employees are not connected to a higher cause at work, because they haven’t been inspired to have one. This is where a great leader can bridge that gap.

The difference between a "leader" and a "manager" is that people follow a leader because they want to, not because they're forced to. If you’re the team leader facing a group of talented but unmotivated people, what do you do to inspire them?

How do you convert something people have to do into something they want to do?

Create another story

As this HBR article suggests, communicating with your team by informing and directing them only works in the short term. To retain top talent, you need to give some extra effort.

Based on my experience working at TTI SI, there's a B.I.G (Build. Inspire. Give.) secret I discovered about how to retain talent. You’re more than welcome to steal these tips and apply them in your own organization.

1. Build emotional connections by being more human.My favorite part of our weekly team meeting is the TPQ (thought-provoking question) session. During this time, we’ve been encouraged to share answers like our definition of the perfect Sunday, our favorite birthday memories, the happiest and saddest thing that happened during the week, and what we want more and less of our lives. This activity gives us a more complete picture of the people we engage with in the workplace. When each of us share and explore our similarities and differences, emotional ties are strengthened and trust is built.
   
   
2. Inspire your team to think about their gifts and the reasons why they work here.During one team meeting, our team leader challenged us to come up with five things that we could do better than anyone else in the building. The result was a deep conversation about why we do what we do, why we come to work every day, and how to amplify our passion through our jobs. Since then, I've become more grateful working with my team. I've recognized we all have various talents and passions, and it also reaffirmed the biggest value I could add to working at TTI SI.
   
   
3. Give compliments and encourage your team to appreciate others.I've been thrilled to receive my boss’ handwritten thank you notes, as they always make my days brighter. But recently we found a better way to share this gratitude. At our last team meeting, we were asked to turn to the person who was sitting to our right and tell him/her one thing we believe he or she did a great job on. Sharing a compliment in this manner is a real eye-opening experience, as we could see our greatness from another person's perspective. For me, it was like rediscovering a beauty that had been forgotten.
   
   

Leaders create loyalty. They have the magical ability to retain talent by making strong connections, inspiring people to think bigger, and driving their team to push themselves one mile farther.

So, back to our first question: Does your team show up every day because they have to earn a paycheck? Or, you can help them create another story, one that is deeper and more fulfilling?