SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Leadership — tracks feedback from more than 190,000 business leaders. We run the poll question each week in our e-newsletter.
Last week, we asked: What’s the biggest challenge you face when leading a “rising star”?
- Keeping them challenged and engaged: 66.89%
- Preventing them from leaving my team: 13.96%
- Getting others to not be critical of them: 10.14%
- No challenge at all! They’re great!: 9.01%
Keep Them Interested. Rising stars are fabulous team members but if you’re not careful, you’ll run out of things for them to be interested in. At that point you risk either losing them or having their motivation wane. Sometimes you’ll need to help them find bigger and better roles which means pushing them off your team and into an area where there are bigger challenges for them to tackle. This notion of promoting them internally is a key to retaining them in your organization. So let go of your fear of losing them and instead help them take that next step in their career.
Mike Figliuolo is managing director of thoughtLEADERS, author of “Lead Inside the Box: How Smart Leaders Guide Their Teams to Exceptional Results” and “One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership.”