This article originally appeared at Mission Matters.
Darrell Crawford shares how The Vantage Group is equipping leaders to increase employee retention rates through leadership development and talent management.
What mission matters to you?
Crawford recollects how he spent his early 20s working for leaders who mismanaged employees and were unclear about their purpose. When he founded The Vantage Group, he focused on creating an environment where leaders encouraged their employees to flourish. This approach, he says, “results in an organization that attracts top talent as well as raving fans/customers, and a unified team that has high morale, clarity of purpose, and focused goal execution.”
What should an employer do to attract top talent in the new marketplace?
“To be an employer of choice,” Crawford says, “you need to identify the current patterns of the marketplace.” Companies are understaffed because employees are no longer okay with not having a life beyond work. Work-life balance, workplace harmony and competitive pay are all must-haves in the modern environment, and employers have to level up if they want to attract and keep top talent.
He also notes the importance of career pathing and ongoing support from those in leadership positions. “People want a purposeful job and not dead-end career pathways,” he notes. “Employers who have well-defined career paths have a leg up in recruitment.” So, it’s also critical to pay attention to employee satisfaction, points of frustration, and turnover ratios; employees need to like the people they work with and feel valued at the end of the day in order to commit themselves to a company long-term.
Tell us about The Vantage Group.
“The Vantage Group is an industry-agnostic company — we work with medical, software, and manufacturing companies—with a range of 10,000 employees to 100 employees,” Crawford says.
“We help companies get clarity through our training programs,” he continues. “The important thing is the mindset shift, which requires leaders and managers to learn a new way of dealing with their people in the organization. To find the roadblocks that are holding people back from performing adequately to reach the goals in the company, we reassess their talent management lifecycle.” he says.
“Another factor that we focus on,” he notes, “is the ability of an employee to articulate your organization’s mission and vision, and if they can verbalize the core values of the organization. If not, you have failed to make a connection with them and didn’t communicate properly.”
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What differentiates your process around the talent lifecycle?
Crawford says we help companies get an objective view of the talent that they have within the organization and create benchmarks for all their key roles. These benchmarks revolve around the behaviors, motivators, and competencies required for each role. They also focus on defining at least five specific things each role is accountable for instead of generic job descriptions.
“To get the benchmark for the job, we create a specific dataset,” he says. “An employer can use it to compare that to people who have been assessed internally within the organization for the promotion, or for people coming from outside the organization. After assessing candidates, we make GAP reports to realign our priorities. The companies that use this process have almost double retention rates.”
What’s next for you and The Vantage Group?
The Vantage Group is ramping up its management training programs, one of which focuses on “The 5Ps: Purpose, People, Pace, Perception, and Profit.” Crawford says that, when companies focus on these five elements in this exact order of priority, they set themselves on a path to success. The Vantage Group travels all over the US to help its clients become employers of choice.