Use the smallness of your business to hold on to your best leaders for business sake
Small businesses can invest in leadership to the same affect as large businesses, but this is not the normal expectation. Even though small businesses represent a significant percentage of total business activity in the United States, even though many small businesses are in business for the long-term, for generations, they are not regarded as businesses that may expect to hold on to talent for very long; if the talent is that good, they will probably go off to a larger corporation that will lure them with the kinds of benefits a small business cannot render. While this may be true for a small percentage of small businesses, it is not necessarily always the case. Some small businesses actively carry out leadership development efforts with those employees that show promise, and it sometimes works.
Leadership development does not only involve advanced training and education, challenging work, good pay, for the outstanding employee, but also requires a healthy dose of enticement. Not all outstanding workers dream of holding a key to the executive's bathroom in some skyscraper in the financial district. Many look for a business that imparts a sense of community, a sense of belonging and worth, a sense of the importance of the employee that larger corporations cannot foster because they are constantly poised as having the resources to get whatever they want. This feeling of being dispensable is an obstacle every large business must attempt to avert in order to keep a talented employee, whereas the small business, by virtue of its smallness, almost automatically makes the employee feel that the business could not do without them. In some cases, it cannot.
Large businesses also have the additional burden of appearing contrived in its efforts to gain the loyalty of an employee, where small businesses, perhaps even those who are being somewhat forced in their appreciation, can express their desire to gain the loyalty of an employee in leadership development, again, precisely because they are small, because they are in competition with larger businesses and cannot hide this fact. There is nothing more frustrating than to take steps to develop a leader for your small business, only to have that employee take off for large paychecks and greater esteem in the world of large corporations. You have to actively, ostensibly, demonstrate to your employee in leadership development your desire to win their loyalty without shame. The truth is also a very impressive compulsion for the employee you are out to retain.
A small business is more intimately related to its employees than a larger one. The team effort is tighter, the social interaction less formal, the emotional ties deeper and more genuine. The family-like feeling an employee in leadership development experiences will pull out of that employee a commitment that a ten-thousand man company simply cannot achieve. Who would not give their utmost to one of their family, to the family itself? The smallness of a small business fosters that family sense that calls for loyalty at the deepest levels. A small business can use this to its advantage when trying to hold on to that remarkable leader that can make the difference between failure and success.
If you have a small business and some outstanding leaders, don't hesitate to develop them. Smallness is an advantage to the business and, sometimes, to the employee as well.