1 Make good hires. Determine whether a position is ready to be filled. Bringing in a new CEO, for example, may require the company founder to step aside.
2 Be realistic. Paint a fair and accurate picture of your company and its products. Many executives say they left an employer because the job did not live up to its billing.
3 Ask them what they want. Gary Gannaway, chairman and CEO of WorldNow, a provider of Web-based applications for broadcasters, schedules regular breakfasts with employees. “It’s all about listening and caring about what they have to say,” says Gannaway, who’s lost only one executive–out of 110 employees–during the two years he’s owned the company.
4 Give them authority and resources. High-level executives need the power to make important decisions and the budget to buy the right tools. Let them hire and build their own teams.
5 Offer new challenges. During the seven years Scott O’Hare has been at Dell Computer, he’s worked his way up from CEO Michael Dell’s executive assistant to vice president and now runs a billion-dollar 550-person unit. “Sure, I could go off and run a start-up, but the intellectual challenge and the ability to work with great people is here,” O’Hare says.
