Thank you all for joining me this morning for our session, Another One Bites the Dust, Three Changes Leaders Must Make to Keep the Talent They Need to Get Results. I'm Leslie Beal, and I am the CEO and founder of Perfusion Strategies. We're a leadership advisory firm. It's based in Knoxville, just a few hours east of here. So I spend all day every day talking about what I'm gonna talk to you about for the next hour or so, and that is how do we build the leaders and teams we need to do the important work that we have to do in the world? Right? So that's what's our topic for today. And if you're in this room, you probably would agree with me that it's getting harder and harder than ever before to find talent. Everybody agree with that? Yeah? I would suspect that if you've selected this breakout session, you're somebody who has said, I can't find the people, it's tough to find the people. We find them, then we lose them. How do we keep up with the environment that we're facing? And that's exactly what we're gonna talk about today. So my goals for our session are to understand the trends that are driving the talent shortage that we're facing. And make no mistake about it, this is an unprecedented talent shortage that we are facing. I want you to really walk away, if you don't walk away with anything else, I want you to walk away understanding the business climate that you're up against. All right? And I want you to understand what drives that business climate, and I hope that I'm gonna be able to persuade you that it's more than just a short-term blip. That this is a long-term societal and demographic shift that we're facing, and that we need to bring new talent, new strategies, new ways to address this, or we're really gonna be falling behind in business. Right? I also wanna convince you, I hope I'll be able to convince you today, that the old levers that you've been using to try to find and keep talent aren't going to be sufficient anymore in today's environment. Okay? It's not that they're wrong, and you'll hear me reiterate this, it's not that the things that you're doing are wrong, necessarily. In fact, many of you are probably doing this right. It's just that it's not enough. Because of the unprecedented situation that we're in, it's not enough to keep pulling those old levers and hoping to get different results. And then finally, I wanna leave you with three practical, tactical strategies that really you can walk out of this session and start to implement as soon as tonight. All right? So I hope that you'll walk away with something that you can go back to your room this evening, or you can get on the plane this weekend, and you can start to think about and put into practice in your own firms. Okay? I'm gonna throw a lot of statistics at you. Some of them, at some points in this presentation, you may feel disappointed. You may feel frustrated. You may have that feeling of, I don't even know why we bother. There's no way we can win this war on talent. Stick with me. I promise we'll turn it around. I also promise that we're gonna start with a little bit of a chuckle, because I'm aware that this can be a little bit of a depressing topic. So I thought we'd start with a little bit of brevity, but brevity that's really meant to drive a point. Oh. Well, let's try again. Can we get the video to play? There it goes. Nope. There we go. How's that coffee coming, dear? Yeah, right away, Mr. Kaplan. I'm not supposed to drink coffee. It makes me gassy. I know. I'll bet you're thinking, what's an intelligent girl who wants to be in fashion doing making coffee, huh? Yeah. Huh? Uh-huh, you got me. I don't think I haven't noticed your potential. Well, I've got a project for you that's a lot more related to fashion. How does that sound? That sounds great. Come on over here, sweetheart. Thank you so much, Mr. Kaplan. Thank you so much. I need these hangers separated ASAP. You're welcome. Oh God, I hate my job. I hate it. I hate my job. I hate it. I don't know, honey. I'm sorry. Oh, I want to quit, but then I think I should stick it out. Then I think, why would such a person stay in such a demeaning job just because it's remotely related to the field they're interested in? Gee, I don't know, Rach. Order up. I got a yentl soup, a James Beans, and a Howdy, hold the doody. Honey, come on. I'm sorry. I don't mind paying my dues. You know, it's just, how much am I going to learn about fashion by walking Myra, the arthritic seamstress, to the bathroom? Hi. Is my misery amusing to you? I'm sorry. I was just, uh... It's not funny. This is actually my job. No, believe me. I've been there. I had to sort mannequin heads at Mannequins Plus. Well then, so I'm just going to go back to talking to my friend here. You can go back to enjoying your little hamburger. Just one other thing. Yes. I work at Bloomingdale's and I might know of a job possibility if you're interested. Do you want my pickle? So how many of you have had a job that felt like the equivalent of untangling hangers in a closet? Right? I have. That's why it's funny. But the reason I share it in this session is because I want you to think about how many of the folks in your firms feel like they're showing up to untangle hangers in the closet. Maybe how many of the prospects that you're talking to feel like what you're offering them is the equivalent of untangling hangers in the closet. And how many of those people are going to go out today to lunch, to drinks with friends, to a networking event, and the equivalent of Bloomingdale's is going to be sitting at the end of the counter. That's what we're up against in today's environment. That's what we're up against. So that I can tailor what I'm going to say just a little bit to the folks we have in the room, really quickly, will you just raise your hand if your firm has five or fewer employees? Okay. 15 or fewer? Okay. 25 or fewer? Okay. Who's got over 25 folks in their firm? Okay. More than 50? Okay. All right, so some pretty good-sized firms. How many of you have somebody who's a dedicated HR professional? Full-time job as HR? Okay. Fair number. And is everybody in this room what I would call a decision maker, someone who is going to be able to implement the strategies that we're talking about without needing to ask somebody else's permission? Or how many of you are going to have to go back and try to convince somebody else? Everybody going to be able to do it themselves? Okay. Who's going to have to do a little bit of an internal sales job? Okay. All right. That helps me just know how we're going to talk about the things that we're going to talk about. The other thing I want to tell you is I'm going to save time for questions. I promise I'm not going to make you late for lunch. That is never a good idea. I am also going to throw a ton of statistics and facts and figures at you. If you miss one of them, don't worry. There's going to be a way at the end that you can get some of the source data that I'm going to refer to. So if you're like me and you like to take notes and it bothers you when a speaker goes too fast and you miss something, don't worry. We got a fix for that at the end. So save your questions. Definitely, we want to tailor this so that it really, really moves the needle for you. So let's talk about historically what we do when it comes to keeping talent. Historically, what do we do? Well, when I came out of school, the way that people found talent and tried to keep talent is maybe they put an ad in a newspaper, maybe they came on campus and they did an interview, right? Maybe they were connected to your alumni association. If we look back 10 years, we started to see people hiring through things like online resumes, things like that, and then in the past five years, we've really seen employers pull out all the stops when it comes to finding and keeping new talent. So how many of you in the past five years or so, how many of you have put in place a new bonus program in your firm? Okay. How many of you have raised salaries? Yeah. How many of you have done things that are like a stay bonus? If you'll stay with us this long, you're eligible for us to pay for a certification or send you back for continuing education. Anybody done a stay bonus or a referral bonus if you send your friends to work here, right, and they stay a certain amount of time? Yep. How many of you have increased the dollars that you're spending to try to find and keep talent? Headhunters, ads, on-campus interviews, visiting job fairs, all of those sorts of things, right? Those are the levers that we've been pulling for the past five years, right? What do they all have in common? Right? They're all money. We just keep pulling the money lever and we're doing it over and over and over again. And how many of you have said, we can't keep doing this? Like we can't afford to keep throwing money at this problem. Anybody said that? Anybody said, hey, we can't keep up with the bigger competitors in our industry if this is the way we have to compete. Anybody said that? It's just not sustainable. We can't keep doing that. And the truth is that you're right. The truth is that you're right is that if you continue to pull the same levers, what's the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over again and hoping for a different result. If we keep pulling the same levers in this business environment, we're going to get the same results. We're going to get the same results. Despite the highest raises in decades, the highest raises in decades, people still struggle to find and keep the critical talent that they need to get the job done. The critical talent that they need. We hear this all the time. We host something we call executive forums, which are just discussion sessions with senior decision makers, business owners, and we're constantly asking them, how's the talent picture? What do you want to talk about? What are your big pain points? And this comes up again and again and again. We can't find them. If we find them, we can't keep them. If we keep them, we can't keep them happy, right? But we're just pulling the same lever over and over. So the truth is that we are facing something that is dramatically different. Dramatically different. And I think it gets missed. I think it gets missed in the news, in the way that we talk about current events, and I think many of us just don't have our eye on the ball when it comes to what we're up against. So what are we up against? To me, this is the headline statistic. Most of you in the room are probably familiar with Corn Fairy. Several years ago, they conducted their multi-year future of work study, and it looked at data from labor organizations, worldwide economists, demographic specialists, and this is the prediction. By 2030, we could have a global talent shortage of as many as 85 million people. I just want to stop and let that sink in for a minute, because I think one of the things that we do is we throw statistics at people and we don't take enough time to make meaning of them. So the first thing that jumps out to me from this statistic is actually not the 85 million. The first thing that jumps out to me is the 2030. It's the 2030. So we sit here today on Halloween of 2024, which means that we are just a little more than five years away from this reality. If we had been sitting in this room five years ago, it would have been Halloween day of 2019. Right? Most of us have a pretty good marker that helps us remember where we were in late 2019, maybe say March of 2020, right? And I know that the COVID time lapse was a real thing, and that we think about time in this really weird way because of where we've been. I don't know about you, but that doesn't seem like very long ago. It doesn't seem like very long ago. And it particularly doesn't seem like very long ago when I think about what we're up against. When I think about the fact that we've got five years to deal with this issue right here, it doesn't seem like very long to me. So 85 million people, what does that mean? How do we make meaning of that? How do we put it in context? Well, I put it in context probably like most of you in terms of dollars and cents, right? This means $8.5 trillion in lost revenue, lost productivity. In the United States, it means $1.7 trillion in lost revenue and productivity. That's about 6% of US GDP. Not because of market conditions, not because of supply chain issues, not because of innovation that we talk about all the time, just because we don't have enough people to get the job done. No other reason. So one of the things I always wanna do is check, right? I told you, we are constantly checking like, is this still an issue for our clients? Is this still an issue for the decision makers that we're dealing with? The other thing we're checking is like, has this shifted? Has something magically happened? Have we found the magical pot of employees that are gonna solve this problem? And I had the good fortune last week to follow at a conference behind an economist from the University of Tennessee who advises our governor on the state of the economy here and in the nation. And this trend continues. It continues to hold. So I know not all of you are from Tennessee. If you're not, welcome. Welcome to my home state. We have added in Tennessee 190,000 to the employment rolls since March of 2020. That's a big number for a state our size. Now you'll notice that I said to the employment rolls. I didn't say jobs. Because right now, as we sit here in Nashville today, there are 62,000 open jobs in the state of Tennessee that don't have anybody to fill them. So the gap for us that we are already experiencing just here in the state of Tennessee is 62,000 people currently. So if you have open jobs in your firm that you can't fill, you are not alone. You are not alone, okay? We also know, we also know that this isn't likely to change anytime soon. I know in this group, you spend a lot of time talking to people about retirement. So you probably know this statistic as well as, or better than I do, right? Baby boomers, the silver tsunami, they are leaving the workforce. They are leaving the workforce. In fact, many of the older end of Gen X is starting to leave the workforce. In the U.S., we're gonna have about 10,000 people every day, every day for the next 19 years reach retirement age. They may not all retire. Some of them will retire before then. But 10,000 people a day reaching retirement age. This gap isn't gonna close anytime soon. It isn't gonna close anytime soon. And, and the business impact of this is really starting to pull some attention. So PwC does, you may be familiar with their CEO Pulse survey that they do. Anybody familiar with that? So they do this periodically. And in one of their recent Pulse surveys, they ask CEOs to rank like what keeps you up at night. Or the biggest challenges you see on the horizon. And in the top 10, in the top 10, half of CEOs said we will not have enough people and that is going to directly impact our bottom line. It's gonna directly impact profitability. So I don't know about you, but I look at this data and I say this is a huge business problem. It's a huge business problem. And in my work life, I see it, I think about it, I hear it from clients. And then I go to the grocery store, to a kid's baseball game, to a school event, out to dinner with friends, and I don't hear this. Because the way we are consuming news, which is a whole other topic not for me to talk about today, but the way we are consuming news right now really clouds this. What do we hear on the news? Anytime there's a layoff we hear about it, right? We hear all this like, maybe the economy's not as good, inflation's really high. We hear those things that are short-term things and we don't see this long-term trend because it's big and it's slow and it doesn't grab our attention in the same sort of way. It doesn't grab our attention in the same sort of way, but it's a significant business problem, a significant business problem and it's one that if we don't address it, it will catch up with us eventually. You heard the statistics, those Tennessee statistics that I gave you are from July of this year, so they are fresh statistics. We are already starting to see the beginning of this trend. Okay, so what I know, just like many of you know, that whenever there's an economic shift like this, whenever there's a demographic shift like this, there are winners and losers, right? When the automobile got widespread adoption, what happened to buggy whip manufacturers? Anybody know a buggy whip manufacturer these days? No, you don't, right? So there will be industry level losers, there will be individual firms that are winners in this. There are always winners and losers when there is a shift like this and my hope for you is that we can give you enough strategies, enough strategies that you'll come out on top. Now, what I'm going to share with you are not the only strategies, right? I looked at your agenda, I know you've got sessions on AI and process improvement and marketing and how to streamline and how to do more with less and I would encourage you to do all of those things. I would encourage you to do all of those things because this is a big enough problem that you can't afford to sort of take this single approach to it. It calls for all the weapons. So when we look at this, given what I do for a living, we say that the secret weapon that you have in this looming war for talent really comes down to leadership. It really comes down to leadership. One of the levers that you can pull that is low-cost, that is in some ways pretty low-lift is leadership. If when you bring outstanding employees into your firm, you treat them differently, you lead them differently, you interact with them differently, you are much, much more likely to keep those people, to grow those people, and to have long-term engaged employees. Now, that's not rocket science. It's not and most of us know it. Most of us know that the reason people leave jobs has to do with their boss. I don't have to stand up here and quote to you the statistics. I can. I can tell you that MIT's Sloan School of Management says that four out of ten of the top reasons that people leave are directly attributable to their supervisor, but I don't have to tell you that. You know that. You know that working for an intolerable boss, working for someone who doesn't invest in your growth pushes people out the door. You know it intuitively, and so my argument to you is not that we've got to do something that's super-duper secret. It's that we've got to dig deep and do the thing that we always knew would work. We've got to dig deep and do the thing that we always knew would work, okay, and it's not going to be for everybody. It's not going to be for everybody. Some people are going to say, nope, I got too much to deal with. I'm going to go deal with clients. We got this new technology we're putting in place. That's going to solve it. That's fine. That's fine. I just want to offer you some additional tools, AI, new software, new processes. Great. Here for it. Love it. Doing the same things in our firm, but I want to offer you some additional tools that you can bring to bear that we see work for clients time and time and time again, okay? So strategy number one, strategy number one is to engage with your people. Engage with your people. So do any of you do employee engagement surveys? Maybe not. Okay, a couple, a couple. Here we're talking about more the layman's term of engagement. What I mean here is you got to talk to your people, and I don't mean just you got to walk in and say, hey, did you see that game in the series last night? You can do that. That's great. You can do that, but you've got to engage with employees in new, deep, meaningful ways. New, deep, meaningful ways. Again, not rocket science. We've got a people problem. People are the way that we solve it. To deal with people, probably not shocking that we have to start by talking to them. It's not shocking, but it is something that people struggle with, right? I mentioned the forums that we do just a minute ago. One of the folks who attends those pretty regularly is the SVP of human resources for a regional engineering firm, and not too long after COVID, they promoted a whole new crop into management. Whole new crop of folks into management, and she called me. She said, hey, it's not going well. You have time to talk about it, and I said, yeah, absolutely. What's wrong? These new managers, their projects are slipping. The timelines are off. Nothing's going the way it should. They're over budget on everything. Everybody's miserable, so I called them in, and I said, hey, you got to talk to your teams about this. Have you talked to your teams about this, and she said, Leslie, they said, no, we are not talking to our teams. We're not meeting with our teams, and I said, okay, did you ask them why, and she said, yeah, I asked them why. I asked them why, and I'm expecting to get, and I think she was expecting to get the answer we always get when people say they can't meet with their teams, which is what? We're too busy. We don't have enough time for that. We got too much on our plate. You know what she heard instead? I don't like talking to people. Right? It's funny. It's funny. We laugh at it. It's maybe not totally shocking from an engineering firm, but it is totally shocking when you talk about a group of maybe 20 new managers that promoted into a role that raised their hand and said, I would like to be in charge of people. I will not speak to those people. You cannot make me, right? But we do this. We do this. We all have known leaders like this who are quote-unquote great at their job, by which we mean they were great at the job they used to have before they became managers, right? They were great at that job. They're great technicians, but they don't engage with their people, right? So what does it look like to really, really engage with people? It looks like connecting with them. It looks like connecting with them. And it looks like connecting with them more than just once or twice a year at review time. It looks like connecting with them on an ongoing, systematic, regular sort of cadence, right? It means that if you have people on your team that you care about keeping, you need to be meeting with them. I would argue our recommendation is always you need to be meeting with them at least every other week. At least every other week. And not in a group. And not in a group. A one-time staff meeting of everybody in the organization or everybody on a particular team, that's not enough. Because some people will interact with you in that group setting. Some people will connect with you and other people won't. You have got to be engaging with the people that you care to keep. Engaging with the people that you care to keep. You've got to ask them what they want out of their work. You've got to ask them what they need from you to do a better job. All that new software and AI and new processes that's going to streamline everything, you've got to ask them how that's going. Is it working? Is it doing what we hoped it would do? You have to talk to people. You have to talk to people. So why don't we do this? And what are the steps that we need to take to be sure that we're doing it? Because I think, I think that even my friends in the engineering firm would have said we should be doing this. Yeah, we know. We know we should be doing this. We're not. I don't like it. But we know. We know we should be doing it. So what stands in our way? The first one is time. So to do this you got to get good at getting out of the day-to-day minutiae. That's why I'm saying to you like all the process improvements that you're talking about, absolutely. All the software, all the technology, anything that you can leverage that makes your daily life easier, that makes the life in your firm easier, leverage it. Because you need time to do this kind of work. If you're serious about keeping employees just like you're serious about keeping clients, you have to invest in them. You have to know them. You have to understand their goals and what they're trying to achieve, right? These are all the things that you do in your professional lives. We just don't take the time to do it internally. So you've got to make time for this. You've got to be intentional and you have to make it a priority. The other thing that we often hear about why people don't do this is like, I don't know, if I talk to people we might get into conflict. And it's true. It is true that engaging with people on this deep level can be messy. It can be messy. It can be that you hear things from people that you really don't have time to hear today. It can be that you hear from them that they want to raise that you can't give them or that they need a promotion that you can't give them. And so often human beings shy away from these human interactions because we're afraid that we're gonna poke the bear and it's gonna wake up and something's gonna come at us that we can't handle. Some of us are just not super empathetic as human beings. We're not naturally high in emotional intelligence. And so connecting with people feels like a drain. Feels like a drain. And I'm pretty cognizant that I'm talking to folks who by and large are in relatively small firms that probably have very busy to-do lists, very full email inboxes, and I am putting additional things on your plate. And I'm really aware of that. But I'm also really aware that if you don't do these things, you're gonna lose a step to the folks down the street who do. Okay? So whatever it is that keeps you from engaging, you've got to figure out how to dig deep and show up for those interactions. Okay? And I'm agnostic as to how you do that. In today's world, you can listen to a podcast to get better at conflict conversations. You can watch a TED Talk. You can read a book. You can hire a consultant. You can hire a coach. Right? You can talk to somebody else in the firm. You can talk to a colleague who's really good at this. I don't care how you do it. That's for you to figure out. All I'm saying is you better figure out how to do it. Figure out what it is. So when I say like, I want you to be able to walk away and do something different tonight on your flight home, figure out what it is that keeps you from engaging with your teams. Figure out what it is that stands between you and really showing up in a new way and doing this on a deeper level. Is it time? Figure out how you can free up a little bit of time to make this happen. Is it some sort of fear or discomfort? Figure out how you address that. Okay? The other thing you can do to really move the needle when it comes to engaging with the people on your teams is for you to get super clear on the mission and vision of the organization. And I mean this, and I'm gonna say something that runs the risk of offending people, but I mean this in a real way. Not in like we went off to the mountaintop and workshopped some three-sentence thing and none of us remember how we got there and it's hanging on a plaque in the wall. I mean the real mission and vision. Like what is it that keeps you showing up every day? Not the marketing message that you put out to the world, but why is it that you and your firm do what you do every single day? And I'm sort of looking around the room. It's a little bit hard to see your faces, but I think most of the folks in this room have been at this a while. One of the things that gets in the way of being clear on mission and vision and being able to share it is it just gets lost in the daily do. Right? We just get sort of worn down. Once upon a time we knew and some days we sort of remember why we're doing what we're doing, but it's it can be challenging. Can be challenging in the span of a 30 or 40 year career to remain clear on mission and vision. So take a little time. Take a little time while you're here to remember why did you choose this profession? What's important about the work that you do? It probably, given what you do for a living, comes down to how you're impacting people. Alright? And then once you're clear on it, you got to share it. What we know about today's workforce, particularly those of you who are trying to attract younger workers, Gen Z workers, fresh out of college, they want mission. And they don't want to just know what the organization's mission is. They want to know how what you're asking them to do on a daily basis feeds into that mission. And they're looking to you to tell them. So if you have young workers, if you're looking to have young workers on your team, then you got to get clear on mission and vision. The other thing you do have to watch out for is that disengagement from employees. Disengagement. And that's why talking to them, engaging with them on a deep level is so important. So if you wait until the person shows up after lunch one day in their interview suit, right, and you know, oh no, they've been out talking to somebody else, you've waited too late. You've probably already lost them. But if you are engaging with people on a regular basis, you'll start to notice things like, the person who used to ask me a bunch of questions has stopped. The person who used to speak up in all our meetings has gotten really weirdly quiet. And if you're meeting with them, you can start to do some digging to figure out why. You can start to sniff out, are they disengaged? Why are they disengaged? Is there something going on in their personal life? Is there something you need to fix? Is there something they're needing from you? What's the risk that you're about to lose them? So engaging with employees gives us a lot of ammunition for the war that we're facing, right? For the war that we're facing. It just helps us keep our finger on the pulse, okay? So that's strategy number one. Really engage with your people. Strategy number two is to learn to really recognize talent. Really recognize talent. So year after year, every single year, the statistics tell us that one of the best ways to retain top talent, and by top talent I mean the people you really want to keep most. The people who are engaged, who are focused on achievement, who want to do a great job. Those sort of A-plus employees, the best way to keep them is to show them that there are opportunities for advancement in your firm, for growth, okay? In fact, if you look at Mercer's most recent state-of-the-employees mind study, they'll tell you that those employees are twice as likely to stay with your firm. Twice as likely to stay. And if they're twice as likely to stay, then when they go out to dinner, or drinks, or to networking events with their friends, they're twice as likely to say, man I love where I work. They give me a ton of opportunity. I get to do a lot of things that my classmates aren't doing yet. They've really put a lot of time and effort into me. I feel like I'm learning so much. What a great recruiting tool. Your engaged, fulfilled employees are the best recruiting tool you'll ever have. So you've got to learn to figure out who those people are on your team and to really pour into them. Now this is about the time when the grumpy Gen X folks in the room, I'm one so I feel more comfortable saying that, start to say things like, yeah but if we talk about development these kids want a promotion immediately. Right? Anybody experience that? Like if we start to talk to them about how we're going to grow them, then they're like, well when do I get promoted? You know what the antidote for that is? Engage with them. Tell them. Talk to them. Right? We have had conversations with the recruiting staff at the University of Tennessee about this very thing like, okay they want promotions really quickly but when you talk to them and you help them manage expectations, then they understand. What they really want is a clear path forward. I would bet that there were times in your career where you probably wanted a clear path forward. When you wish somebody could say, hey you need to get better at this. You need to really lean in to this skill. For the next six months I want you to focus on this. Because when we don't give people that opportunity they feel adrift. And when people feel adrift they feel dissatisfied and when they feel dissatisfied they start to interview. Right? They start to interview. So recognizing talent means more than just putting people in a lock step program. Most of you don't work in big enough organizations where you can do that. But even really big organizations don't have a promotion for everybody every year. Right? But recognizing talent means saying, hey I want you to learn this new skill. I want you to be the go to expert on this new estate planning tool. But it doesn't mean I want to promote you and here's a guarantee for when that's going to happen. So show people the opportunity that they have with your firm. Show them what is possible. Show them what's possible. Okay? So what does that mean? What does that mean from an action standpoint? I'd love it if every one of you went back and identified like here's my team. We call them high po's. You may have programs where you call them high po's, high potential folks. I don't care what you call them. Right? But look at the people that you say, man it would really hurt to lose this one. And that's where you start. That's the person that you pour into. And frankly that's probably the person you engage with first. That's probably the person you engage with first. And then you start to talk to them about where do they see themselves? What do they want? And you start to imagine what's possible for them. Tell them what you see in them. Many of us don't have any idea what we're good at. It takes someone else to tell us, hey you've got a real knack for this. So if you notice an employee, anybody at any level on your team, if you notice someone who has a real knack for something, tell them. Pour into them. It doesn't have to cost a ton of money. What it does mean is that if you're a leader in your firm, if you're someone who's a decision maker, you have to be really good at coaching and developing people. You have to be really good at coaching and developing people. And that means that sometimes you're going to have to be good at difficult conversations. It also means that you're going to have to be good at skills like delegation. Because people can't develop around you if you don't give them things to do. If you don't let them try. Now look, I know that that is scary. I know that it is scary. I don't love the idea of turning a new team member loose on a brand new client. But if you are an artful delegator, if you get good at this, you will find the thing, the one little piece of this that you can let somebody else own. You don't throw the whole project at them and say, bye, I'll be at the beach for six weeks. You have to be a good delegator. You have to be good at managing that. And you have to be good at giving feedback if it jumps the tracks. I can't tell you, when we're closed doors with decision makers, how many people say, the reason I don't delegate is, what happens if something goes wrong? You tell them it went wrong. But that is terrifying to many people. So for you to do this, for you to learn to recognize talent and to pour into it, you've got to be comfortable delegating. You've got to be comfortable giving feedback. And you've got to know how to coach people. You've got to know what to tell them to help them get to the next level. For most of you, that means slowing down. Most of you are already experts in your field, and you know what to tell people. You just don't remember what you've forgotten. So it requires some time, and it requires some intentionality. So that's strategy number two. The final strategy, and these build on each other. You'll start to see how one makes the other easier. So the final strategy is really to build a development culture. To build a development culture. Those of you who have dedicated HR, the real temptation is to say, oh, HR's got it. I don't have to worry about that. Don't do that. HR can't own this alone. Because by its very nature, culture is something that permeates an organization. So a development culture is one where people are meeting with their leaders on a regular basis. Where standout talent is recognized, sort of tapped on the shoulder, and developed to get to the next level. And a development culture is where everyone in the firm takes responsibility for this. A true development culture is where everyone in the firm is working to get better all the time. Means you're working to get better. It means you're talking to your teams about how you're working to get better. It means you're talking to them about how to get better. It's this constant iteration of moving to the next level. This constant iteration, all right? So what do you do? Many of the same things. Many of the same things. Ask people what they want to learn most. Hey, what interests you? Your real high achievers will tell you. If you're meeting with them regularly and you say, hey, we're here to support you. We want you to learn and grow. One of them will say, hey, I'd like to be the go-to person who learns this new tool, learns this new piece of software. They'll say, I'd like to take the lead in this client meeting for this particular part of our presentation. Can I do that? And it'll either be for you an immediate yes, yeah, I can. You can do that. I trust you. Or it'll be, absolutely not, you're not ready, but let me help you get ready. Or it'll be somewhere in the middle. It'll be somewhere in the middle. And that's a conversation. So that's a development culture. It's a culture where these things matter and where people aren't saying anymore, they're too slow. It takes too much time. We'll just hire somebody new, right? That's not a sustainable long-term strategy. I probably don't have to tell you that if you are just going out and hiring people and they are going out the back door faster than you can bring them in the front door, the time and money and effort that you're spending on that is exhausting. It's exhausting. We've got a company that is sort of in our awareness and their HR person reached out to me and said, hey, we've got a team. We've got a team of young managers and we are spending thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars recruiting and our recruiters are killing it and they are bringing people in the front door and these managers who've never had any training, who aren't any good at this yet, are running them off and I'm like, well, this is not a recruiting problem. It's a management problem. It's a leadership problem, right? So they've fired the recruiting staff. They've turned over the recruiting staff. They've poured more money in it. But the truth is, you bring somebody great off the street and you dump them in a place where you're going to show them that development doesn't matter, they will leave. And the scary thing is, the most capable ones will be the first ones to leave, right? The people who don't have other options, who can't go anywhere else, who don't have this hunger for achievement will be the, they'll be the ones who stay. The people who want to go, who want to achieve, who want to grow, they're the ones you're going to lose and they're really the ones you want most. Okay? So three strategies, engage with your people, get really good at recognizing talent, and then build a development culture that you can put them in. Again, those strategies are not the entire universe. They are not the entire universe. You are going to have to think about comp strategy. You're going to have to think about bonuses. You're going to have to think about efficiencies and streamlining processes and technology levers that you can pull, because we are up against a really big problem. And you need to pull all of the levers. But I believe, because I have seen, that the people who come out and win in this environment are going to be the people who do these strategies and do them well and do them often. Now I'm, I would venture to guess that I'm preaching a little bit, at least to some level, to the choir in here. There may be some of you who say, well, we're already doing that. That's fantastic. That's fantastic. You've got a great head start. Go back and think about how you can double down on your efforts. Where can you be more effective? Where can you reach people earlier? Where can you really hone in on the people who are the top of your organization? The other objection that I hear to this is like, oh, but we're behind, and this takes forever. If I just pay somebody more than I can get them right now. That's true, and my response to that is always that old adage about the best time to plant a tree, right? Best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The best time to be engaging with people, to be developing people, to be growing people was 20 years ago, 10 years ago, 7 years ago, right? The second best time to plant a tree, today. The second best time to engage with your teams, to start recognizing people who are the top talent in your organization, and to start really leaning into developing them is today. Because those are the organizations that are going to come out as winners, okay? So learning objectives, I hope that if I've done nothing else, I've given you a clear vision of the problem that we're facing. And I hope that I've convinced you that there is no magic pot of talent sitting on the sidelines that's going to come to save you any time soon, right? I also hope that I've shown you that we can't just keep throwing money at this problem. Because throwing money at this problem doesn't create new humans, bless you. And I hope that I've given you three strategies that you can start to implement, that you can start to implement really for zero dollars. That's the thing we hear from clients, it's like, we've got to do something that doesn't cost money, right? So three strategies that don't cost money, they're going to require intentionality, they may require you to dig deep and move outside your comfort zone as a leader, but you should be able to start taking action on at least one of them today, okay? So I'll take questions, I think there's a mic somewhere, so if you have questions I'm happy to do that. And if you want the statistics and the resources, you can just scan this QR code and send it to us and we will get those to you early next week. All of the data and the source material, but does anybody have questions about these strategies or more specifically about the talent challenges that you are facing in your firms? Any questions I can answer for you? Oh, we've got one. Is there a mic? Do we have a mic? Somewhere? Okay. I can hear you and I'll repeat it. Yeah, the question is, do I really think these statistics will materialize with AI and technology or will that create enough of a buffer for us that we'll be able to meet this? The short answer is I don't know, I don't have a crystal ball, but I know that any portion of that shortage is going to be pretty crippling to us and I know anecdotally that right now these are the challenges that I hear clients struggling with at different levels at different times. I do think we will see some shifting. I think there will be some geographic differences, we'll see population move, and so some people will feel this in different ways than others. I think we'll see industries sort of ebb and flow, so I think that we'll not have a steady even impact against everybody, but I do think that as business owners, as business leaders, we can't afford to not pay attention to this. I would love to say don't worry about it, AI is going to save the day, but the short answer is I don't know. I don't know how much impact AI is going to have and it's sort of outside our scope today and it doesn't really talk about the upskilling or the reskilling that's going to be required. That's another really significant challenge that we face is that some portion of the current labor force, even the bodies that we do have, are not a great match for the jobs we have, and so even if AI is able to alleviate some of this, I think there's still enough of a population challenge, and if you look at birth rates and death rates, there doesn't seem to be an easy fix to me, so I think some portion of this will materialize. I think it's something we still need to be paying attention to. Other questions? Yes? Yes? Yeah, so the question is these are great strategies for keeping current talent, but how do we attract new talent in the door? So I would tell you, and many of my friends in marketing I think would tell you the same thing, is that as employers we don't pay enough attention to marketing ourselves and our firms as an employer brand, sort of here's who we are to work for. I actually think that these strategies and building that sort of internal team of cheerleaders who go out to have drinks, to networking events, who say, I love working here, let me tell you about my job, or you know, you show up with your friends to go out after work one day and everybody else is complaining and you're like, I love it, I'm having a fantastic time. So I think these strategies actually do both, although they are targeted at really doing sort of the activity is focused on your current clients, I think it does have a spillover effect to your recruiting. The other thing I would say to people is like, tell your story. Tell your full story. Don't just say, this is comp and this is benefits, but like, this is what an employee experience is like. This is what it's like to work for us. This is how we deal with people. And when you bring people in, let them talk. Hopefully you've got younger employees on staff, newer employees on staff that will talk to them and tell them what a great organization it is. I think that really moves the needle the most. So not only look at what you're doing and see what you can do better, but look at what you're doing and how you can tell that story better. Does that answer your question? Other questions? All right. So I am supposed to remind you to fill out your evaluation forms. Please do that so that they get the feedback that they need. I get the feedback that I need. I will be around for a few minutes. I don't want to keep you from lunch, and it looks like we are a few minutes early, so that's fantastic. But I'll be around. If you have a question or something that you would like help with, please feel free. This is my cell phone and my email address. Feel free to reach out if you have questions about retaining talent, about how to engage with them, about how to build this development culture. I'd love to help in whatever way we can. Thank you all again for coming, and enjoy the rest of your afternoon.

talent retention

global talent shortage

employee engagement

leadership strategies

development culture

high-potential employees

workforce adaptation

competitive edge

Leslie Beal