Top Talent: Keeping Performance Up When Business Is Down

During tough economic times it's more vital than ever to hold on to and leverage your top performers: They've got the outsize smarts and dedication your firm needs to survive recession and emerge stronger. Yet in 2009 many employers are failing to support and sustain their best people. Loyalty and trust are out the window. Engagement is through the floor. Flight risk is at an all time high.

In Top Talent, a volume in the Memo to the CEO series, Sylvia Ann Hewlett presents new data detailing what has happened to top talent in this brutal down cycle. She then explains how companies can re-engage and re-energize their stars.

Drawing from virtual strategy sessions conducted within fourteen corporate giants—including GE, Merrill Lynch, and Time Warner—Hewlett presents eight cutting-edge interventions that have emerged as "top picks" for managers looking to motivate top talent in tough times, including:

• Show that top leadership cares
• Create a "no-spin" zone characterized by candid, frequent communication
• Strengthen camaraderie and model stress-busting behaviors
• Provide powerful nonmonetary rewards

Concise and practical, this guide is essential for employers seeking to turbo charge their star performers.

During tough economic times it's more vital than ever to hold on to and leverage your top performers: They've got the outsize smarts and dedication your firm needs to survive recession and emerge stronger. Yet in 2009 many employers are failing to support and sustain their best people. Loyalty and trust are out the window. Engagement is through the floor. Flight risk is at an all time high.

In Top Talent, a volume in the Memo to the CEO series, Sylvia Ann Hewlett presents new data detailing what has happened to top talent in this brutal down cycle. She then explains how companies can re-engage and re-energize their stars.

Drawing from virtual strategy sessions conducted within fourteen corporate giants—including GE, Merrill Lynch, and Time Warner—Hewlett presents eight cutting-edge interventions that have emerged as "top picks" for managers looking to motivate top talent in tough times, including:

• Show that top leadership cares
• Create a "no-spin" zone characterized by candid, frequent communication
• Strengthen camaraderie and model stress-busting behaviors
• Provide powerful nonmonetary rewards

Concise and practical, this guide is essential for employers seeking to turbo charge their star performers.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett is an economist and the founding president of the Center for Work-Life Policy, where she chairs the Hidden Brain Drain—a task force of fifty global companies committed to fully realizing female and multicultural talent. She also heads the Gender and Policy Program at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. She has authored several books, including Off-Ramps and On-Ramps (Harvard Business Press), named as one of the ten best business books of 2007 by Amazon.com.