Retention Rises as a Key Leadership Skill 

A debate on stakeholder capitalism at Davos found business leaders shaking off old divides between shareholder value and employee care. CEO of telecoms hardware leader Ericsson Borje Ekholm said: “If you run a company, you cannot prioritize the shareholders, because if you do, you’re going to make short term decisions and short-term decisions never build a company.

Ekholm continued, “You really need to think about the employees. Having great employees is the only way to have a great company. Great employees will also do the right thing for the customer. And you need to think about society. You have a role in society to play. We as companies need to have that as part of our purpose. We need to help our society develop, whether it’s through education, whether its other parts, but we need to play a role in society.”

Dheeraj Pandey, CEO and founder of Nutanix, recently told a room of CIOs and CTOs, that he’s been very pleased at the extent to which Nutanix employees strive to, as Ekholm puts it above, “do the right thing for the customer”: "I am most proud of our people, after 10 years we have been able to seep a customer-centric focus into everybody at Nutanix."

Being focused on the employees, and in particular the new workforce, is not without its challenges, though. 

Chris Howell, CIO of global publishing house, Hachette, observed that “For those people born in the 90s and up, they are feeling like they cannot afford a house, they will be less well off, the climate is in a state, and we live in an antagonistic world. So we have a cohort of people in their 20s who have high anxiety.”

Howell, as a CIO, sees his role as contributing to how organizations can help this age group engage, and to changing the workplace and leadership for the better. 

“I am making sure that I continue to adapt, listening and making sure that I am informed about the challenges and context. This is important as people come into the organization who have life experiences that you cannot be close to,” he says. 

Technology provides a working environment that allows diversity and emotional awareness to thrive and this can and will lead to greater retention the CIO says. 

New Structures

The technological reshaping of culture is also making society more democratic and therefore less hierarchical, which the HR.com research says will suit the T-shaped employees, who are natural leaders in environments that are about outcomes and not political structures. For those being led, over 30% of respondents to the Harvey Nash report said poor leadership was the main reason for changing role, and with technology changing at an unprecedented rate, it is not surprising to learn that over 20% of those changing jobs do so because they saw better training opportunities in a new position.

Rui Pedro Silva, Director of Technology Strategy at global shipping firm Maersk, says making sure everyone in the organization understands why change is occuring can avoid those feelings of poor leadership or not being counted. “We need to have a meaningful strategy that means that as CIOs we help the business to be a digital skills firm, for all people of all ages,” Silva says. “This is one of the main goals of the executive, to bring a digital mentality and skills to an organization and we need to be ambassadors.”

White adds, “clearly, having good line management and a boss that an individual respects and gets on with can make a significant difference to retention. Whilst there is no silver bullet to keeping prized tech staff, companies can make a significant difference.”