Have you ever had those meet-and-greets with new senior leaders in your company?  You know the kind, where you have a new VP or Senior VP come in and meet their new team.  They often do their talk and then they ask if anyone has any questions.  Normally you’ll get one or two easy questions for them to answer or some questions that someone is just asking because it’s their personal bone to pick.  After these questions, there’s usually a lot of silence and the meeting ends.

Do you ever have any questions for senior leaders?  You should and you should make it a hard one, here’s why…

You’ll stand out.  They’ll remember that you asked that difficult question, the kind that lets them provide insight into your business and problems that you’re facing.  Often there’s an opportunity to ask for help and resources.  They might ask what they can do to make your job easier, tell them exactly what you want, because they might just surprise you with resources and their influence to make your life that much easier.

That’s the power of asking questions instead of sitting back during that awkward silence.

Have you ever been in a meeting and the conversation suddenly goes off on a tangent and you feel the urge to bring it back on track?  That’s what you’re supposed to do of course, but sometimes it’s interesting to see where the conversation goes.

Somewhere along that tangent, you might find a cool new way of solving the problem you called the meeting for in the first place.

Going off on tangents also helps teams bond over common ground and interests, but I digress…

Can you predict who will leave your company next?  Is it that disgruntled high-flyer who’s pissed that they were passed over for a promotion?  Will it be your superstar salesperson, poached to run the sales organization of your biggest competitor?

Do you think you could do anything to stop them from leaving?  How do you figure out who’s the biggest flight risk and get to them before they leave.  Google thinks they have a solution.  More on this in a second, but first, here’s what Google’s doing to stop the mass exodus: Google to Give Staff 10% Raise

Google’s so worried about staff leaving that they’ve pulled a bunch of compensation from stock options into base pay.  Google’s battle to win talent isn’t an easy one, especially where they’re located, right next to some of the tech field’s biggest startups, namely Facebook, Zynga and Twitter to name a few.

Predicting who will leave your company next
Google’s battling to keep top talent, so they’re trying something pretty interesting.  They’re trying to come up with an algorithm that will predict which employees are likely to leave.  Wonder what factors weigh into that equation.  They stated employee reviews, but I would guess search behavior would fall in as well.

What other factors do you think they could use?  Monitoring what sites people visit?  How many days people are out randomly?  It’s an interesting question to ponder.