What is the biggest barrier to retaining high performers in your organization?

Our reader poll today asks: What is the biggest barrier to retaining high performers in your organization?

• We can’t challenge them enough 10.21%
• We can’t promote them fast enough 25.66%
• We can’t pay them enough 39.36% 
• We can’t keep up with them, and they get frustrated 16.03%
• Something else 8.74%

Challenge, Promote, and Pay Them. It seems creating opportunities for career and financial advancement are the biggest barriers to hanging onto your high performers. There are only so many promotions to go around and budgets are always tight. Given those constraints, it requires you to think creatively as a leader. Are there roles in other functions, departments, or divisions of your company that would be promotions for this person? Sure, it means they leave your team but at least they stay with the company. There’s also a good chance they’ll “boomerang” back to your team in the future when you have an open role that’s a fit for them because you took care of them. On the pay front, are there creative spot bonus programs available? One-time award grants? Other benefits that don’t hit the salary line of your budget? Are you budgeting aggressively enough to create salary space for the next time you have to advance them? Sure, it’s hard keeping your high performers. It’s even harder losing them and hiring/training someone new to fill their shoes. Put in the effort to keep them.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

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These results were originally a SmartPulse poll in SmartBrief on Leadership which tracks feedback from more than 240,000 business leaders. Get smarter on leadership and sign up for the SmartBrief on Leadership e-newsletter.