Talent Flow: A Strategic Approach to Keeping Good Employees, Helping Them Grow, and Letting Them Go

I got this book because I had read these same authors first book, High-Impact Hiring (by Rosse and Levin). Talent Flow to me is the follow-up to High-Impact Hiring. The first book is about how to hire someone for your business in a practical way based on performance, and Talent Flow is about what to do after you've made the hire: How to keep employees, keep them satisfied, and over the long run decide if you want to keep them and what to do about it. I liked both books.

Bought this book for my business, because of some problems we were having with dissatisfaction. I didn't think we had any retention issues, though. This book gave me much more than I bargained for. Instead of just having scattered tips on how to retain people or how to deal with dissatisfaction in your organization, these authors give you a complete framework that links workplace satisfaction and dissatisfaction with productive and counter-productive work performance and with employee retention. That's what they call "talent flow." When you have dissatisfaction at work, some of your good employees turn into bad ones, and other good ones leave. If they're leaving faster than your poorer performers, your organization is going to fill up with the kind of workers you don't want. The book helped us to find ways to keep our best employees more satisfied so that they kept performing well and stayed longer. It also helped us identify the others, and help them either move up or move them out. One of the best things about the book was the way the concepts and the practical advice were tied together. The authors write about research they did on how dissatisfaction affects work performance, and they also have clearly worked with a lot of businesses, because they are talking about real-world problems and real-world solutions. Good practical tools, too. Great book! Helped my business.