How to Keep Your Most Talented People

How to Keep Your Most Talented People

Adapted from “The Wall Street Journal Guide to Management” by Alan Murray, published by Harper Business.

In 1943, social scientist Abraham Maslow outlined a pyramid that showed what he called the human being’s “hierarchy of needs.”

People start with a desire for basic physiological needs: food, clothing, shelter – that’s the bottom of the pyramid. Once they’ve achieved those, they seek safety, and then social interaction and love, and then self-esteem. Finally, at the top of the pyramid, is what Maslow called “self-actualization” – the need to fulfill one’s self, and become all that one is capable of becoming.

In the early days of the study of management, Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote that what workers most want is high wages – which would help them fulfill their basic physiological needs. But it’s fair to say today, most workers – and particularly your best workers – have made their way to the top of Maslow’s pyramid.

“Making a living is no longer enough,” wrote management guru Peter Drucker. “Work also has to make a life.” If you want to keep good people, their work needs to provide them with meaning – a sense they are doing something important, that they are fulfilling their destiny. At the end of the day, these psychological needs are likely to be as important, and perhaps more important, than the salary you pay.

To keep your best people, then, you need to make sure they are personally committed to the goals of the organization, and that they feel those goals are worth achieving. And you need to make certain they feel they are playing a suitably significant role in reaching those goals.

That’s a complex management challenge, not easily summed up in a few simple rules or guidelines. One good description of the complex social and psychological elements that go into creating a satisfying workplace is in Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Soul of a New Machine.” Mr. Kidder skillfully records the human drama, and, ultimately, the magic that motivated a team of engineers at Data General Corp. in the 1970s to develop a new generation of computer.

The Data General team worked with little formal encouragement from the company’s top management. But they came to believe in what they were doing. At the end of his book, Mr. Kidder compares the people on the team to the stonemasons who built the great cathedrals:

“They were building temples to God. It was the sort of work that gave meaning to life. That’s what [team leader Tom] West and his team of engineers were looking for, I think. They themselves liked to say they didn’t work on their machine for money. In the aftermath, some of them felt that they were receiving neither the loot nor the recognition they had earned, and some said they were a little bitter on that score. But when they talked about the project itself, their enthusiasm returned. It lit up their faces. Many seemed to want to say that they had participated in something quite out of the ordinary.”

That is the magic of managing talented people.

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