Recruiters want your top people. And they know how to win them over. They invite your best and brightest to break free of their current positions and conjure up visions of the work they’d love to be doing.  Retention expert Beverly Kaye, coauthor of Love ’Em or Lose ’Em: Getting Good People to Stay (4th edition, Berrett-Koehler, 2008), looked at the top 20 reasons employees stick with an organization instead of seeking greener pastures. She found that career-development opportunities headed the list, even above higher pay. “If you don’t talk to people about their careers, you risk losing your best talent,” she says.

                Helping employees plot career paths is something that every manager can do—and not just in the annual performance review. Harvard Management Update talked with talent-management and retention experts for their advice for managers who want to let their direct reports know that their career aspirations are heard and valued.

1. OVERCOME THE FEAR FACTOR. Why do managers have such a hard time discussing career development? Usually it’s “the fear factor,” says Maggie Sullivan, executive vice president of a human-resources consultancy headquartered in Metuchen, New Jersey. “Managers are fearful that they will have to deliver a message that will be met with resistance”—for instance, having to tell someone hungry for a promotion that he’s not yet ready for it.

                Other managers fear that by helping employees grow, they may be helping them grow out of the unit. But a talented employee who receives no encouragement from his manager to stretch and develop may believe that the manager does not value him or see his potential; for him, leaving may seem the most sensible option.

2. HELP THEM CHART THEIR CAREER PATH. Before you initiate the first conversation, consider that many employees are not completely sure of what they want, says Timothy Butler, author of Getting Unstuck: How Dead Ends Become New Paths (Harvard Business School Press, 2007) and director of career development programs at Harvard Business School. If you’re talking with a particularly talented and versatile member of your team, she may find it hard to identify a specific career path because she doesn’t want to limit her options. You can help her identify the most promising possibilities by asking questions such as:

                * What assignments have you found most engaging?

                * Which of your accomplishments in the last six months made you proudest?

                * What makes for a great day at work?

                It may take time for some employees to relax enough to speak their minds. “Make sure that you are clear about your role in this conversation,” says Butler. “Are you a mentor or a boss? Don’t expect a fully frank discussion if your employee thinks that your primary agenda is planning for your staffing needs.”

3. MAKE A PLAN. After you and an employee have identified one or two career targets, your conversations should focus on how to get him there: the skills he will need to develop and the support you can give him. Most of the steps for developing skills will involve on-the-job activities.

                Kaye recalls an employee whose presentation skills had room for improvement. After assigning him to give a talk to a group of vendors, his manager asked a colleague to help the employee prepare. “That one experience helped the individual learn what it took to make a good presentation more clearly than anything else he had done,” she says.

4. KEEP TALKING. Once you and your star employee have a plan, keep the conversation going. Libby Wagner, founder of Seattle-based Professional Leadership Results, advises having 15-minute to 30-minute career-focused check-ins once or twice per month.

                To ensure that each new conversation builds on the ones that came before, take good notes and review them periodically, advises Robin Athey, head of organizational effectiveness for Deloitte Research. While this may seem like a lot of extra work, it will show your stars that you’re paying attention. And the notes will help when you bring in other managers or HR to help implement career-development plans.

5. BE FRANK AND SPECIFIC. Career development discussions can be uncomfortable when the manager points out the employee’s weaker areas. To keep the discussion focused and positive, cite specific examples in which her weaknesses worked to her detriment and highlight the benefits to be gained from building particular skills.

                Applied Research’s Sullivan once worked with the manager of a high performer whose career progress was impeded by his abrasive interruptions during meetings. In their monthly career check-in, the manager detailed how, in a recent meeting, the employee’s interruptions alienated a colleague who’d planned on siding with him in the discussion. By speaking forthrightly and providing specifics, the manager was able to make the employee see how his own behavior was holding him back.

Do your stars see a reason to stay?

Recruiters want your top people. And they know how to win them over. They invite your best and brightest to break free of their current positions and conjure up visions of the work they’d love to be doing.

SUPPLY CHAIN: SUBSIDIES AND THE CHINA PRICE

Many assume that China’s cost advantage in manufacturing comes from cheap labor. But in China’s burgeoning steel industry, our research suggests, massive government energy subsidies, not other factors, keep prices down. These subsidies have broad implications for how companies compete and collaborate with Chinese businesses.

Father & Son & Co.: The Claudios

Roberto Claudio Sr. and Roberto “Toby” Claudio Jr. are more than just father and son. They are also partners in business.

Under the elder Claudio’s guidance, Toby’s Sport’s has become the leading sports store in the country. And when the time came for junior to help in the family venture, his son eagerly and enthusiastically joined the business.

Father & Son & Co.: The Uys

JACINTO Uy believes he’s luckier than most family-centric businessmen: all his children chose to work for him.

“The greatest thing about it is enjoying working under him,” Uy’s son Michael, the eldest of three children helping to steer Moldex Group of Companies in a high oil price environment and ride a booming real-estate sector.

Winning: Worldwide leadership

Q: How will the Internet change leadership? Octavian Pantis, Bucharest, Romania

A: Profoundly—but not entirely. Indeed, not in one aspect that matters a lot.

The future in a grain

THE Primer Farm School (PFS) will open on June 15 in San Jose City,  Nueva Ecija, with a simple aim: Let us export rice in three years. If this appears to be too ambitious, let us make it in four.

As carriers fight in the skies, Pinoy OFWs suffer on earth

WHEN Rexz Maranan came home from London via the Middle East to bury his 80-year-old mother in January, he expected to be away from his work for about two weeks before returning to his job at the Heathrow Airport as a security officer. 

Getting sound advice on social initiatives

Companies today face a common challenge: how to develop workable programs that will help them move forward strategically on corporate social responsibility, or CSR, initiatives that matter to customers and employees. 

Use role-play to drive front-line change

Leading change is never easy, but in some contexts it’s especially difficult. Ask Elaine Weinstein. A former HR executive at KeySpan, she encountered strong resistance to change when management at the unionized utility decided to implement some new HR and workflow processes that would eliminate redundancy.

Moving Mercy

US Navy ships laden with relief supplies steamed away from Myanmar’s coast Thursday, their helicopters barred by the ruling junta even though millions of cyclone survivors need food, shelter or medical care.

Internet to play a big role in future Smart applications

There’s this universal taboo that makes for a colorful discussion from science-fiction films to religious zealots down to Room 107 of the science club, which is: humans cannot fall in love with an inanimate object.

Winning: Take hiring ‘rules’ with a grain of salt

Q:  When you have a capable person to promote in your company but that person does not have the appropriate tenure with the organization, is it better to hire someone from the outside for the job? Natalia Salistean, Bucharest, Romania

Textbook blues–again

WHEN public high-school sophomores get the new Social Studies textbook next week, they will be holding in their hands what could be a source of a diplomatic irritant: the book mentions Taiwan as a “country” separate from the People’s Republic of China, in violation of the one-China policy, which the Philippine government upholds.  

DepEd adopts ‘Textbook Walk’

THE delivery of textbooks from the Department of Education in Manila to far-flung areas is usually a boring and mundane obligation.

But come July, select communities in remote areas will be welcoming the arrival of textbooks with celebrations resembling town fiestas, complete with dances and décor.

Maternal Mortality

Freda Atienza knew giving birth to her second child will be difficult. Three months into her pregnancy, her husband left her and their 8-year-old daughter for another woman.  She’s also been diagnosed as having a cyst in the right ovary.  She’s been in and out the hospital for excessive bleeding. According to her, she has mastered the art of enduring and suppressing her pain.

Don’t just capture knowledge–put it to work

What’s the point of capturing organizational knowledge if it’s going to be tossed into some file and forgotten? That’s all too often what happens to lessons from postmortems and after-action reviews.

4 common innovation mistakes

Those who lead innovation face formidable challenges. Often there are multiple and sometimes contradictory goals to pursue, many available levers to shape the innovation context and just as many hands tugging on them.

Winning: Age is just a number

Q: What impact do you think John McCain’s age will have on the coming election? Paul Bartlett, Lake Mary, Florida

A: You’ve come to the right place for an answer. One of us (guess who) happens to be the founder and president of the Life Begins at 70 Club. The other—well, she attends all the meetings.

The new Official Diaspora Assistance builds nations of the future

HANOI, Vietnam—Old-timers to this socialist country’s capital will tell you that Hanoi remains the same: swarming motorcycles that tell pedestrians to drive and walk at your own risk; many small businesses operating beside each other; and the abundance of rice fields amid today’s global rice crisis.  But many Asian attendees at a regional gab here were surprised with something else: Monies from offshore are swarming Asian developing countries, and can even lead to social and, obviously, economic development when maximized well.

Tragic life, with or without cyclone

MYAWADDY, Myanmar—The bustle on the main road of this border town halts at the sound of powerful engines. Residents stare as half a dozen olive trucks from Mae Sot, Thailand, rumble across the 300 square meter-long friendship bridge.

Making the most of mentors

At age 26, while slogging through 14 voice mails on her phone, Christina Domecq realized there might be a business in converting audio messages into text. Within a few months, in 2003, she had turned that idea into the start-up SpinVox.

Managing false negatives

In the late 1980s, scientists for New York City-based drug maker Pfizer began testing what was then known as compound UK-92,480 for the treatment of angina. Although UK-92,480 seemed promising in the lab and in animal tests, the compound showed little benefit in clinical trials in humans.

The Puno court and the two remedial scalpels of amparo and habeas data

Generations of law students and lawyers, many of whom are now prominently serving in the Judiciary, are familiar with the landmark case of US. Bustos, G.R. No. L-12592, March 18, 1918. 

Office landlord

WILLIAM Willems operates his office—all 950 of them in 400 cities—with a thin gilded plastic sheet the size of a credit card.

“This is what I call an upgraded Starbucks principle,” Willems told the BusinessMirror, flashing the 3-inch by 2-inch card embossed with his name.

Winning: For little companies, big ideas are a must

Q: We’re an outsourcing start-up that wants to break into the United States and European markets. But the big companies that could be our clients won’t even talk to guys like us. How do we get them to at least hear our proposal? Ram Muthiah, Seattle, Washington

How to manufacture a global food crisis

WHEN tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico last year to protest a 60-percent increase in the price of tortillas, many analysts pointed to biofuel as the culprit.

The best advice I ever got

In the summer of 1982, I worked for Donald Regan, then the US secretary of the treasury under President Reagan. I was about to go into my final year at Wharton and, having worked many summers at Estée Lauder Companies since age 13, was no stranger to office life. But in this role my title was “special assistant to the special assistant”—not what I had anticipated.

Leading an innovation review

Innovation is fraught with uncertainty. Is the timing right? Will the consumer buy the product, and then buy it again? Will the technology work at the right price? The sad fact is that one can do everything right and still get it wrong—and this reality must be reflected in the review process.

Hurd mentality

WITH electronic chips competing for grain as the commodity of the computer age, it pays to have a salesman at the helm.   

winning: Keeping one’s eyes on the future prize

Q: What are the big concerns confronting business in the next 10 years? Fatma Abdullah, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

More mouths to feed

Ask Josephine Gonzalez how many children a family should have and the stick-figured 31-year-old mother answers without hesitation. “I only wanted three,” she says, trying to soothe the naked baby boy who tugs at her ragged dress.

Philippines feels the pinch of dollar’s decline

The US dollar has always been king down by the docks on Manila Bay, where Philippine seamen congregate to swap stories and look for work.

10 reasons why electricity bills are high

Note: After Manila Electric Co. (Meralco), the country’s largest electricity distributor and supplier, announced in April an increase in its generation charges by 51.88 centavos per kilowatt-hour (kWh), rumors of a brewing government takeover began spreading like wildfire.

Working in the gray zone

Using company resources to work on personal projects, especially on company time, is a no-no for employees in most organizations. But supervisors often operate in what I call a gray zone, turning a blind eye to such officially forbidden behavior. They realize that stamping it out may do more harm than good, because many employees have a deep-seated need to engage in it.

Creating the conversations that create innovation

One of the great myths of innovation is that breakthrough ideas are produced solely by intuitive individuals or by small creative teams working in isolation. The reality is that whether we think of Thomas Edison, Ted Turner, Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs, most well-known innovators developed their breakthrough ideas as a result of interacting with a rich and diverse community of people.