Page 170 - Retaining Top Employees

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158 Retaining Top Employees

Maverick Alert!
With top employees,using goal setting to ensure that they do
the required tasks can prove daunting and sometimes tiring.
High performers can sometimes see this aspect of setting goals as mun-
dane and boring compared with the other two purposes (providing
challenging projects and delivering meaningful work).Also,top perform-
ers tend to think that they need little help with this part of the process.
Despite the difficulty,don’t ignore this step! It’s a mistake to move
on to providing challenging projects and delivering meaningful work
without first ensuring that your employees achieve their tasks.

year’s sales quota as detailed above (task-related goals).
She then challenges Joe to achieve at least 15% of that
quota from new accounts in the pharmaceuticals industry—
an industry in which the company is currently underrepre-
sented. Now Joe has a goal that not only will help the com-
pany broaden its sales but also will challenge him more
than his basic sales quota.
Set Goals for Relevance and Meaning
Putting together task-oriented goals and bundling them into
challenging projects is good, but not enough to meet the goal-
setting needs of top performers. The final step is to ensure that
these employees are keenly aware that their work is relevant.
Top employees rarely
Not Optional! stay for long with an
You should bundle task-ori- organization where they
ented goals into challenging feel that their work is irrel-
projects for all of your employees and evant (or insufficiently
provide all of them with meaningful appreciated—but we’ll
work,but it may not always be possi-
deal with that point sepa-
ble. With your best performers,how-
ever,these steps in the goal-setting rately). You can help
process are not optional.They must ensure that their work
be challenged and feel relevant: it’s feels meaningful by setting
almost always essential to their social goals that are connected
and psychological makeup. Don’t miss as directly as possible to
these steps! the core of the business