New York SBDC Research Network

From Gallup : Which of your employees are most likely to quit? If you follow Gallup's analytics, you might answer that the least engaged employees quit more often. That is true -- improving engagement among your employees is one of the best ways to slow down turnover. However, there is a group of employees that merits particular attention: your most talented employees. In our recent work with organizations across various industries, we discovered something really interesting and somewhat unsettling: Highly talented employees who are not engaged were among those who had the highest turnover in each organization -- on par with low talent, disengaged employees. In other words, when your best employees are not engaged, they are as likely to leave your organization as your employees who tend to have performance issues and are unhappy. Why do they leave so quickly? We speculate that your most talented employees are more likely to have high expectations of their workplaces... But ...

From Startups and venture capital : I recently read a story here titled "We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made..." Let's dissect this because there is so much more than meets the eye here. Presumably, if you have read the story, you understand that the author describes a problem worker that he has dubbed “Rick”. Rick is the local genius with a ton of domain knowledge about their product and a member of the core development staff for this product... Personally, I'm of the opinion that if you find these people and you are in the process of interviewing them, regardless of whatever modicum of talent they have, they aren't worth your time because of the loss of morale and teamwork they bring to the team. This is actually something brought up in the story itself — about how Rick ignored team meetings and belittled his co-workers. About how after Rick left, productivity soared and they managed to pull together to save the day! The author does this to ...