Does your company struggle with retaining experienced staff? Are you consistently losing high potential employees to competitors or to other more attractive career opportunities? Does this seem like a problem that won’t go away, no matter what you try?

Recently, I spoke to the CEOs and managing partners of the largest public accounting firms in the U.S. (outside of the Big Four) who have struggled for years to retain experienced staff. Like many organizations today, these leaders are particularly worried about retaining women who have the potential to become partners. Here are three things I shared that you can do to get more traction on this issue.

Bound the Problem

Unwanted turnover may seem like a baffling problem, but it’s not an issue everywhere in your organization. Some unwanted turnover is much more damaging than other losses. The accounting executives I spoke to, for example, recognized that losing a highly-trained specialist in one tax area would be much more costly for the business than losing other employees who could be replaced more easily.

We use a tool called a “Knowledge Silo Matrix” to help clients quickly identify where unwanted turnover poses the greatest risks for the organization. We’ve used this tool with large engineering groups in power plants, association management companies, non-profits, community hospitals, fast growing software firms, and midsize manufacturing plants. The need to bound and prioritize specific turnover problems is a key first step to improving retention where it matters most.

Question Your Assumptions About Retention

The challenges of retaining great employees have been around a long time. This is not a new issue for many organizations. But for a variety of reasons it’s becoming a more serious concern. So you need different, more creative ways of thinking about this problem.

One way to do this is to confront the “Knowing-Doing” gap. You’ve known unwanted turnover is a threat to the business for a long time, yet you’re not making progress on this problem. Two wise guys from Stanford University, Jeff Pfeffer and Bob Sutton, pinpointed part of the problem in their book “The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge Into Action”. They argue that too many executives today let “smart talk” substitute for action. As a result, nothing gets done! If you’re not making progress reducing unwanted turnover, ask whether talking about the problem is actually getting in the way of trying new approaches to learn what works and what doesn’t.

Clarify the “Talent IQ” of Your Leadership Team

You may know the specific talent problem you need to solve and what steps you want to take, but organizational barriers can kill meaningful initiatives. One concern is the “Talent Management IQ” of your leadership team. Your executives can be put in one of four categories:

Innovators – continually come up with new proposals or insights to improve the firm’s talent practices and processes.

Champions – are senior managers who proactively recognize that retention and talent development are an essential part of their job, so they enthusiastically support new initiatives that others create.

Conformers – will comply with routine processes and practices for retaining talent. You can tell these leaders what to do, but they won’t take action proactively.

Laggards – are so caught up in day-to-day operations that they don’t understand how to think proactively about reducing turnover, and they don’t believe that managing talent is a central part of their role.

How would you rate the members of your top management team? Good luck, if you’re trying to implement retention initiatives with a bunch of laggards. Are you still promoting these people into top management roles? (Ironically, even firms with a reputation for great management can have 25 percent of their leaders in this laggard category.)

Reducing unwanted turnover may seem like an intractable problem, but you can make measurable progress if you follow these steps, for starters. Contact me if you want to have a conversation about how I can help you improve retention, accelerate knowledge transfer, or meet other talent challenges created by the aging and changing workforce.