Any company or business is as good as its employees. Human resources management is of immense importance to the overall pulse of any business or company. The intricacies of HR management can be borne out the balance that has to be struck between managing employees on an individual (micro) level and a team (macro) level. There are numerous clusters of types of employees that can be present in any establishment e.g. difficult employees, slow employees, and so on. Today my lenses are on talented or innovative employees. I’m discussing tips that can help equip you with the right approaches in dealing with such employees.
Appeal To Their Skillsets
First off, talented employees have an insatiable hunger for their skillsets to be put to task. They want to be assigned tasks that’ll make their expertise flow out. A talented and innovative person if they don’t feel that their skillsets are being appealed to and challenged, may find it has a negative bearing on morale. As an employer always ensure your talented employees are engaged in such a manner that appeals to their skillsets. Due to their invaluable expertise they will not hesitate to look elsewhere if their skillsets are being rendered dormant. Their innovativeness makes them highly sought-after so their alternatives will be plenty.
Allow Them Autonomy And Discretion
Talented employees tend to be full of initiative and normally want to have the room to use their own discretion. Allow them that room because such employees want to have a semblance of independent control on how they operate. They shun excessive bureaucracies, bottlenecks and being micromanaged. All you need to ensure is to be crystal clear on what’s expected of them, giving frameworks or guidelines and getting periodic briefings on progress being made. Giving them room to operate autonomously and with discretion can be easily achieved by giving them supervisory responsibilities over projects or tasks.
Foster Teambuilding
So we all know that in workplaces no man is an island – you’ll always operate in team setups. Managing talented employees in the context of teams is critically important because the consequences thereof can be overarching. Talented employees tend to be ‘odd ones out’ because they usually have high-performance levels and excel ahead of virtually everybody else. This means that being brow-beaten or being subject to smear campaigns is inevitable for a talented employee – not everyone appreciates and celebrates talent. This can significantly affect such an employee so negatively that they can end up holding back their talent just to find favour in the sight of their colleagues. The other issue is that a talented employee can be so overbearing because his/her expectations of other colleagues can be unreasonable. Usually, talented employees benchmark everyone against themselves and have a hard time appreciating that people are different – this can result in serious friction. As an employer, there is also a high affinity for you to treat your talented employees exclusively and that can weigh down on the overall cohesion of the team. As much you have a talented employee never lose sight of the fact that they operate with others and thus pay close attention to teambuilding.
Be Wary Of Burnout
I’ve been a victim of this sometimes – being given too much to chew. It’s quite common for employers to have an inclination towards assigning most tasks to the talented employees. This is mostly premised on their confidence in knowing the tasks get done. Though this is testament to how talented an employee is it can end up compromising the performance or even the health of the employee. Talented employees usually get to take their work home and oft time they work into the late hours of the night. They end up barely getting adequate rest and this isn’t going to turn out well for both the employee and the company. So it’s important that you assign reasonably manageable tasks and remember to oversee their workload. This issue can be two-tier i.e. the talented employees can take up too many tasks or you, the employer, can be the one assigning them too many tasks. Either way you must be objective enough to ensure that burnout is alien to them.
Facilitate Their Continuous Learning
Talented employees are voracious when it comes to acquiring new skills and knowledge. Make it possible for them always stay in that zone of continuous learning. It’s actually wiser to hear them out on what their learning interests are, be it academically, through short courses, workshops, and so on. You can even take a different path where you just make available tasks, a working environment and work resources that allow them to continuously learn. This has a benefit of them feeling indebted to the company but it overall fulfils them and further enhances their capacities and performance. Remember I alluded to how talented employees tend to be ahead of others right? Well, facilitating their continuous learning can further widen that gap so strike a healthy balance such that fellow colleagues don’t lag behind.
I’m sure you can infer from my tips that the secret lies in striking healthy balances. You want to appeal to certain desirables but at the same time ensuring that numerous other aspects are being concurrently kept in check. For instance, an appreciated (or praised) employee is poised to deliver more, that’s a given. On the flip side, you don’t want to overdo it to the extent that he/she begins to develop an inflated ego. Same goes for fringe benefits; they are an effective tool for appeasing their loyalty and performance, but, strike a balance with their colleagues too.
