Everyone wants to retain talented members in their team. Here is a little advice from Mario Mazzola, Chief Development Officer at Cisco Systems on how to go about it.

Motivating and retaining talented people can be difficult. There are situations when a leader has to motivate his/her people to find a complex solution rather than a simpler one. There are occasions were he/she might have to make people find really simple solutions.

Mario Mazzola, Chief Development Officer at Cisco Systems, suggests that one effective way to retain talented people is to provide them with challenge.

Some talented people are good at finding complex solutions to complex problems. But simple solutions can be useful sometimes. So Mazzola encourages these kinds of people to design simpler solutions by mastering the basics. Designing simpler solutions needs discipline, imagination, and self-confidence. This task provides them with enough challenge.

Some talented people are good at finding efficient and innovative ways to develop new technologies. But since customers use existing technologies, what they really need most of the times, is an integrated solution. Creating an integrated solution can be a complex problem and a complex problem might need a complex solution.

To encourage people to develop complex solutions, Mazzola first acknowledges their resourcefulness and also encourages them to meet customers to understand the situations in which customers operate. This provides them with healthy challenges, while giving recognition to their ingenuity.