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Retention leadership: the fundamental assumptions that guided many of the philosophies, principles, beliefs, and teachings of leadership have been largely based on the availability of an ever-expanding and perpetually better-educated talent pool. Those assumptions are about to change in a big way. All of our weather gauges are buzzing.

Article Excerpt
Every organization, large or small, that expects to grow and prosper must make talent retention a top priority. Failure to do so may be at the least a form of organizational denial and, at worst, a recipe for steady decline.

The documented impending shortage of U.S. labor, a widening skills gap fueled by the educational demands of knowledge work, and an improving economy that predicts a looming "war for talent" that will make the talent war of the late 1990s look like a skirmish all point to the need for updated retention competencies for leaders.

TalentKeepers, an employee retention firm, has identified 10 retention talents essential for leaders to understand and perform in order to retain and engage employees:

1. Build trust.

2. Build esteem.

3. Communicate.

4. Build climate.

5. Be a flexibility expert.

6. Act as talent developer and coach.

7. Build high-performance.

8. Be a retention expert.

9. Monitor retention.

10. Find talent.

Using that success formula, leaders retain and engage employees, but, most important, they earn their employees' trust.

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Each of us has at one time or another designed, facilitated, or participated in a leadership-focused learning experience. Leadership programs come in all shapes and sizes, all degrees of sophistication. They are the bread and butter of training departments. Developing leaders has long been at the center of the universe for the learning and performance improvement profession.

Beginning early in the past century, when small proprietorships gave way to the rise of major corporations following the industrial revolution, organizational hierarchies emerged, thrusting the role of leaders into the spotlight. In 1923, the American Management Association was formed, with a focus on educating leaders, and Fredrick Taylor, with his widely adopted principle of "scientific management," helped popularize and shape our early understanding of the role of leaders in managing talent.

In the second half of the century, leadership training took off when organizations, such as the Center for Creative Leadership, opened and a wave of university-based executive education programs followed in the footsteps of Wharton, the first one, in 1953. Today, in ASTD's most recent State of the Industry report, "managerial/supervisory content" is the highest ranked non-technical area in total content-related spending. Google the phrase "leadership development" and more than 7 million records emerge. The last time I looked, Amazon.com listed 59,366 book titles under the heading "Leadership."

The rush to capitalize on the widespread growth of leadership development has spawned countless theories, competency models, principles, programs, and practices. Whether it's grooming potential team leaders, preparing new supervisors, or coaching executives, the development of future and existing leaders is an immensely integral part of workplace learning. Few observers would argue that this boom has been anything but good--good for organizations, good for the people who become more confident, competent leaders, and good for people being led.

But is it possible that this decades-long journey...

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