Playing The Long Game: 5 Principles For Fostering Talent Loyalty

In 1984, I graduated from college with a degree in accounting, and accepted a job with Elliott Davis, an accounting, consulting and tax firm founded in 1920 and headquartered in Greenville, SC.

I am one of a very rare breed of workers. Forty years later, I am still at Elliott Davis. I stayed at the original firm that hired me right out of college.

It is a truism now that in order to rise in a career, you have to leave the businesses that hire you—and leave, and leave again. Frequently this is spoken of as a positive for the individuals. If you have a flock of companies on your resume, then that means you have gained a knowledge of different systems, processes and skills. You have embraced the culture of a variety of organizations and hopefully learned from all of them.

There is some truth to that.

But there is truth to its antithesis, too—staying, sinking down roots, and embracing the challenges of the changing years within the same company provide a certain heft as well. Over the past few decades, I believe that we may have erred too much on the side of “leave your job to rise in your career.” It is possible to hold out to our employees at least a vision of rising while staying put. To do so, we must build the kind of business that fosters a sense of longevity and stability, as well as innovation and ambition for employees looking to build a career in one place.

There is little doubt that longevity for the people in an organization is an incredible gift. Glance at almost any team sports story and you will find mention of the value of the long-term continuity of players that stick around and grow and change with the team. Tim Duncan spent his entire NBA career of 19 years with the same team, the San Antonio Spurs. The late Kobe Bryant did the same—20 years with the Lakers.

Interestingly, the names of the teams are almost as iconic as the names of the players. Tom Brady and the Patriots. Larry Bird and the Celtics. Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers.  During the time that those teams maintained impressive continuity from their star players, they also built a name and legacy for the team as a whole. The teams became known for a certain culture—you could reasonably say “Lakers culture” or “Patriots culture” and sports fans knew what that culture entailed.

What fosters that kind of loyalty from supreme talent? How do we build companies that acquire lasting talent and team continuity?

Elliott Davis has changed dramatically since I arrived in 1984. It has grown into one of the largest firms in the Southeast, with more than 800 people in nine offices across the Southeast. As I look back on my first few years at the firm, I have realized that from the beginning I felt good about my opportunities. I believed when I arrived that I would remain at the firm. Staying at Elliott Davis was an easy, simple and clear choice for me.

Today, as CEO, I am familiar with the challenges of retaining talent. Leaders of companies of all sizes and across all industries put an enormous amount of time and energy into finding talented people who embody similar values and sterling character, but every treasure that we find necessarily means that we must work even harder to keep them. Today, in 2024, all CEOs wrestle with the talent issue in ways that we might never have before. Some industries, too, have been hit harder than others, particularly retail, manufacturing, food services and others.

What have I learned as a CEO about retaining great talent? For that matter, why did I choose to stay, from young college graduate, to today? And why was it such a simple clear choice for me?

Below are five principles I have gathered through the years both from my own experience in “staying put” at Elliott Davis, as well as during the past 20 years of pursuing and retaining talent. These are the principles we try to build into our identity at Elliott Davis, and I think they can help any industry or company improve their retention percentage, whether it is basement level or blue-skies high.

1. “It is good people who make good places.” – Anna Sewell, author

Retention is first about recruiting. The greatness of a firm and its culture begins with hiring the right people, and then retaining them.

No matter what challenges, disadvantages, market or economic difficulties a company experiences, if its leadership can find and gather together great people, problems can be solved and challenges met.

People join other people.

Having great people gathered together under one team banner attracts other people to join us. The gathering of talent yields almost a snowball effect — talent attracting talent, culture attracting culture-creators.

Further, keeping people is often about the other people who are here. It is the people that we enjoy being around and that we appreciate who keep us together. Through our people, we form a coherent team that is moving toward a common goal.

One of the primary reasons I stayed at Elliott Davis was the sheer enjoyment of it. And the main reason I enjoyed it was the people who surrounded me. Good people make good places. We know that if we get that one thing right at Elliott Davis, we will have won the game of retaining people.

2. “Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.” – Voltaire, writer, philosopher, poet

More than we did in the past, we offer greater appreciation for our people now.  We are also thoughtfully ambitious for our people. We want them to have a future in the firm—as opposed to simply a place for people to come to work—and we are intent on helping to discover and build that future for each person. That ambition to help craft a future has become a very intentional effort from our core group of leaders.

Many of our people come from other places, of course, and we have received positive input from them about our firm’s culture. They are treated more as individuals than cogs in a large bureaucratic wheel. “This place is different,” they say.

Note that this principle builds on the first one. If you have great people working together, the new people can see how to rise, can recognize and use potential mentors, and can guide the people who come after them.

3. “Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.” – Jimi Hendrix, musician

We believe that it takes input from everyone to understand what it takes to be successful—and getting that input is very challenging. It takes time and energy and commitment to get broad communication. This can often be seen as a time-waster—but it is anything but that.

We try to help people get comfortable with providing input. We let people know that there is no risk in sharing. We listen a lot. We also try to have more group discussions than we once had. So we gather people together and ask for feedback. That feedback needs to come from across the boardthroughout all the ranks within the firm.

We pursue further feedback by asking our office leaders to pursue input from focus groups on particular topics. Those groups need to be broadly gathered—not simply with one or two of the same people.

4. “A relentless barrage of “why’s” is the best way to prepare your mind to pierce the clouded veil of thinking caused by the status quo. Use it often.” – Shigeo Shingo, Japanese engineer

Good businesses accepts that they are not perfect. They accept that they will have turnover, hopefully less than most. Typically, we want people who leave us to have done what was right for them. They leave because they have an opportunity that they want to pursue.

Accepting the reality of turnover, however, does not mean that we should be cavalier about talented human beings leaving us. There is a difference between people leaving for an opportunity and people who leave bad situations that we have somehow created. We try not to make mistakes that cost us good people.

So if a business does lose somebody because of a situation it has created, then the leaders need to first know that it happened and second, say, “Let’s go get better.” Ask how to learn from a departure, own up to our mistakes, learn and work hard to prevent its happening again.

At best, even if we have created the most favorable context for a person practicing his or her talent and working with us, we also have to accept that great people are in high demand and will be pursued all the time. In today’s world as never before the best people in every organization are being recruited by other companies on a routine basis. The fact that they are your best is demonstrated by other companies wanting to hire them and recruit them for their own team.

5. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” – William Faulkner, author

It is important to have people who have been around for a long time to tell the story —to tell our story. At Elliott Davis, our “old hands” talk about how we have managed to be successful through different eras. They support and recognize that change is necessary. They see change as a friend, not an enemy. But they value the tradition, too—and the truth is, tradition and history are embedded into the fabric of an organization. We have to acknowledge that history and recognize that it is a part of our corporate identity.

We gain trust and confidence by listening to these senior people who have experienced a more extensive history of the firm. Yes, we are different now. But senior people point to our heritage, draw connections between the past and present, and reveal how many challenges have been overcome in the past. And how we can do that again.

With them, we gain more trust that change is our ally—because they have seen that change and survived the turmoil of it to arrive in our present. In a sense, they testify to our victories as veterans who have been through the battles.

Broadly speaking, we believe that if we commit to gathering great people, show appreciation and listen to them, ask good questions in order to improve, and listen to the story of those who have been with us in the trenches, we will succeed in holding great teams together. Good people, we believe, will stick with us because we have painstakingly and methodically crafted a great place, a place where people want to be.

Notice that none of that can happen if you do not get principle #1 right. Get great people together and working in harness together, and great things can happen for a very long haul. Sometimes 40 years. Sometimes even more.

Let’s not forget, too, that there are also individuals who start their career and recognize early on that their starting point is not what they want. We have seen that trend at Elliott Davis with new arrivals. Many times people put in a few years at one place, realize what they want, find a great place elsewhere, and remain for the rest of their careers.

What if every company focused on creating a place where most people hired there wanted to be there 40 and 50 years later? I suspect that the business growth, success, joy and camaraderie we experienced would feel absolutely revolutionary.

And that is because it would be.