Imagine this: You’re a business owner, leading a company you’ve built from the ground up. You’ve poured your heart and soul into it, and you understand that the strength of your business comes from the team that supports it.
But hiring and retaining talent is hard. Some of your best employees quit and move on. Each time, it feels personal—like they’re abandoning you and your vision. It stings.
Maybe this scenario sounds all too familiar. Maybe you’ve experienced firsthand the high cost of not getting the “people part” of your business right.
Here’s the truth: Talent is your business’s most expensive and most important investment. Get it right, and your business thrives. Get it wrong, and you’ll constantly struggle with turnover, disengagement, and stalled growth.
I spent ten years at Chick-fil-A, a company known for getting this right. I saw firsthand the difference it makes when an organization invests deeply in its people. And I’ve also seen the consequences when businesses fail to do so—it’s costly.
As Chick-fil-A founder Truett Cathy famously said, “We’re not in the chicken business, we’re in the people business.”
So how do you invest in your people to ensure both their success and the success of your business?
1. Combat Apathy
Apathy can silently kill your business from the inside. Everyone experiences it—whether you’re an employee or the founder. Work becomes routine, and engagement wanes. For your employees, who may not feel the same passion you do, it’s even harder.
We work really hard, then our days get mundane and repetitive, and we get bored. The work isn’t as exciting, and we stop caring about performance, results, or really, anything at all. You’ve probably felt this as a business owner. Imagine how much harder it is for an employee who doesn’t care about the business as much as you do!
To fight apathy, create an environment that’s challenging, rewarding, and aligned with your team’s personal goals. Invest in ongoing training, foster creativity, and celebrate achievements. When employees feel that their work is meaningful and valued, their passion is reignited. This improves morale, boosts productivity, and reduces costly turnover.
One overlooked strategy is to give employees special projects outside their daily routines. When they have something new and exciting to focus on, they’re less likely to disengage. At Chick-fil-A, even something as simple as reorganizing the sauce storage became an opportunity to reignite interest.
At Chick-fil-A, we had plenty of employees fight apathy. When all you do every day is take hundreds of orders in the drive-thru or make hundreds of chicken sandwiches, over and over again, you will eventually encounter apathy.
But when we could take an employee who dealt with that, and give them a new side project, they would light up with excitement. It would sometimes be as simple as reorganizing the storage rack where we kept our sauces. But by having a new project to do that took their time and attention, we helped our employees fight apathy.
Look around your business. What small but meaningful projects could reinvigorate your team? Identify them, assign them, and watch as your employees rediscover purpose in their work.
2. Treat Feedback as a Gift
When you hear the word feedback, what emotions come to mind? For most people, you get nervous, angry, anxious, and stressed. When people hear the word feedback, nothing good comes to mind. Let’s change the perception on feedback.
One of the most significant ways to invest in your talent is by fostering a culture where feedback is seen as a gift. Feedback, when delivered effectively, is one of the most powerful tools for personal and professional growth.
Feedback is simply a response to an action that has taken place. That response can be positive or negative. Feedback needs to be structured so that behaviors are continued or stopped. In order to do that well, you need an easy way to give feedback.
The W.I.N. feedback method simplifies it:
- W – What behavior did you observe?
- I – Why does it matter? Connect it to a bigger purpose.
- N – Navigate a clear path forward. What needs to happen next?
Another way to incorporate a culture feedback is to give four times as much positive feedback as negative feedback. If the only time people hear from their leader is when they are underperforming, they’ll never trust you or think you have their back. As a result, their behaviors won’t change. By giving four times as much positive feedback, you build trust and give your team members confidence.
Lastly, treat feedback as a gift. Gifts are given to a specific person, are well though out, wrapped up nicely, handled with care, and given to make someones life better. Feedback should be no different. Make sure your feedback is for a specific person, well thought out, presented nicely, handled with care, and given to make someone’s life better.
3. Create a Clear Path for Growth
Everyone wants to know how to grow in your business—whether through promotions or raises. Yet, many businesses fail to provide a clear path for advancement. This ambiguity frustrates your high achievers and leads them to burnout or attrition.
The result is that the high achievers in your organization work really hard, try ot be friends with the right people, but end up burned out. They are willing to work hard to move up and grow, but they get tired of playing the game.
The best thing you can do for your team is to eliminate the confusion. From day one, create a clear path for growth. Ley out exactly what it takes to make more money and what it takes to get promoted.
At Chick-fil-A, we solved this by creating clear advancement paths from day one. New team members could see exactly what it took to earn raises and move into leadership roles. This clarity motivated high performers, who often received promotions and raises within weeks.
For our business, this was simple: learn and become an expert in a new area of the business, and you can get an immediate raise. We allowed new team members to earn up to $2 more dollars an hour, just by learning and mastering new areas of the business.
The result was that the high achievers rose to the top. They got up to a $2 raise in their first 2 weeks on the job. This might sound crazy, but they were proving themselves to be hard workers and good fits for our business. By learning new areas, they were creating value for themselves, and we were honoring that value by paying them more.
We were also building our leadership bench. We had team members who were self identifying as the future leaders of our business. And we were paying them more to stay with us. These same high-performers were also the first ones to apply for and request a promotion, further building our leadership bench. Our best people worked harder and worked for us longer.
By providing this clear path, you eliminate confusion and frustration. Your best employees will be eager to rise to the challenge, helping your business grow stronger with them.
“The People Business”
Every business, no matter the industry, is in the people business. The success of your company rests on the shoulders of your team. Investing in their growth and engagement is costly—both in time and money—but it’s the smartest investment you’ll ever make.
If you fail to invest in your people, your business will struggle to grow. The cost of replacing disengaged employees is far higher than the cost of building a team that loves their work and stays with you for the long haul.
Hire great people, invest in them, and your business will thrive. Take care of your team, and they’ll take care of your business.
