Retaining Top Performers During Change

According to Judith Ross, “coping with change is a permanent part of the manager’s job”. Since this is an established fact, one would expect that manager would strive at retaining the top performers – those that have been instrumental to the growth of the company before the period of change. However, it would be shocking to note that often times than not, these top performers are not retained. The question here is why do managers fail to retain these strategic employees?

Generally, one thing that happens when there is a change in the organization, the leaders or managers are often “too busy” handling matters that concern the paper work. Thus, they rarely communicate the essential information these top performers who in turn make different interpretations to what they are seeing. In periods of change, the managers are under pressure and they seem to worry more on the structure rather than those employees that made the structure.

Therefore, Top performers are left to navigate their way through the happenings in the company and because these set of employees are passionate about their careers; they are forced to look elsewhere because they see no future, assurance in the restructuring. Furthermore, when managers do not communicate effectively to their employees, especially those top performers, there are unintended consequences. From my experience from the paper, I discovered that in times of change, when managers do not communicate the specifics to their employees, they are forced to imagine the worst that can happen and decide on this.

These consequences should be a source of concern to organizations because these top performers are the backbone of the organization. Personally, if I were the manager in my organization, whenever there is change, the first people I would do is to sell the change to my top performers. I would explain the why, the how, and the specifics. I would immediately involve them in the change. Reference: Ross, J. (2006). Retaining top performers during change. Harvard Business Review.