This post is about retaining great people, particularly at big companies in industries like technology, where stock options matter and where people can relatively easily move from one company to another.

Actually, I lied. This post isn’t really about retention at all.

It’s about winning.

Let me explain:

Companies that are winning—even really big, old ones—never have a retention problem. Everyone wants to stay, and when someone does leave, it’s really easy to get someone great to take her place.

Companies that have a retention problem usually have a winning problem. Or rather, a “not winning” problem.

The typical case is a company that used to be a hot growth company, but the growth has flattened out, causing the stock to tank and everyone to be in a bad mood. Or, alternately, an older big company that did really well for a while but more recently hasn’t been doing so well, causing the stock to tank and everyone to be in a bad mood.

In other words, a company in transition—from winning at one point, to not winning now.

The only way a company in that situation can retain great people is to start winning again.

Great people want to work at a winner.

All the raises, perks, and HR-sponsored “company values” drafting sessions in the world won’t help you retain great people if you’re not winning—not even the $6,000 heated Japanese toilets in all the restrooms, the $30,000 Olympic lap pool out back, and the free $4 bottles of organic orange juice in all the snack rooms.

This seems deeply unfair when you’re going through it, because when you’re not winning, that’s exactly when you need all those great people the most!

Oh well. That’s the price we pay for living in a society where jobs aren’t for life anymore.

So the right question is, how can we start winning again?

In this post, I’m going to punt on large parts of the answer to that question, as follows:

• I already discussed the big company turnaround scenario in my last post in this series, which describes how to take a big company that is no longer winning and set it up to win again.
• A company that was a hot startup a few years ago and grew fast but is now seeing growth slow has a slightly different problem—your original product cycle has peaked and you need to find a new product cycle. That’s your big challenge, way beyond retention. But I’ll talk about that in a future post.

Retention follows from the steps you are taking to orchestrate the turnaround and/or get to the next big product cycle.

Having adroitly sidestepped most of what you need to do, let me now address some things you can do to help the retention situation while you are addressing the deeper issues required to win again.

1. First, don’t give up. I am particularly talking about the former hot startup that is now a large slow-growth company. It is easy to say, well, we’re not a startup anymore, we’re not a growth company anymore—now we’re a big company, and we need to change our culture and our methods to attract and retain the kinds of people who like to work at big companies.

Doing that will make your situation far worse, by causing the remaining great people you do have to abandon ship even faster. Who wants to work for a company that has given up on having energy and drive and ambition? And then you will end up with a staff that only knows how to be a big company—that only knows how to maintain something that someone else has already built—which is death in any industry where things change all the time.