In retaining employees and keeping them engaged, we’ll cover the five activities of great (vs. good) managers (we prefer the term “coaches” — more on this later):

• Help people play to their strengths.

• Don’t demotivate; dehassle.

• Set clear expectations and give employees a clear line of sight.

• Give recognition and show appreciation.

• Hire fewer people, but pay them more (frontline employees, not top leaders!).

Teams need to be well-rounded, but their individual members don’t have to be.

Focus on ways to make your team’s job(s) easier — a great definition of an effective manager/coach.

Thus, a key function of great managers/coaches is helping individual employees refocus and prune their jobs over time so they focus more on activities that give them strength and less on activities that make them weak.

Finding employees’ strengths and focusing workers on those assets is the most powerful people-management tool we can suggest. And it goes hand in hand with dehassling a person’s job.