Last night a dozen technical leaders gathered for the Bay Area Engineering Managers Support Group to answer the question:

“What are the most effective steps a manager can take to retain key employees?”

The following guidelines where provided:

• Consider this question from your own personal experience.
• What were the things that kept you?
• What effective measures did you take to retain people?
• What things could have been done to keep you: “If only my manager had…I would have stayed.”

We used the Group Wisdom Without Groupthink technique to capture the experience and wisdom of the whole group. More than twenty ideas were generated and discussed. Each idea was given a short name, and posted on the wall. The group then ranked the ideas, based on their own real-world experience. The exercise took an hour.

Here are the results. Some of the names, such as “Giving Credit…” mean pretty much what you would think. Others, “Empowerment” for example, represent the groups best effort at summing up a much more in-depth and detailed idea. The ideas are presented as ranked by the group. I have left out a number of ideas that were considered but ultimately not selected by the group.

Tier One
Empowerment
Giving Credit, Recognition Both Public and Private
Create an Enjoyable Work Environment

Tier Two
Be a Buffer Between Senior Management
Willingness to Actually Lead
Proactive Problem Resolution
Tolerate Failure
Compensation

Tier Three
Clear Shared Vision
Mentoring for Professional Growth
Prioritize to Prevent Waste
Respect

Tier Four
Training
Match Interests to Roles
Be Accessible
Provide Tools for Success
Regular Performance Reviews

Looking at the results, I am struck by how similar they are to the results that have come from workshops that have sought to identify the qualities of a great manager. Results from some of those can be found here. This seems to support the idea that people stay or leave based primarily on their relationship with their manager.

Perhaps now is a good time to mention that I offer one-on-one coaching for engineering managers, as well as several workshops to help engineering managers succeed:
Managing Technical People
Coaching and Mentoring
Delivering Effective Feedback
Makings of a Great Technical Manager
and many more!