"Confidence in US Economy Rises in August" (Reuters);
"Nonfarm Employment Grew by 207,000 in July" (BLS);
"July a Hot Month for Jobs" (CBS);
"Fed: Business Up, Inflation Eases" (CNN).

Now, don't you feel better?

Actually, if you have employees, you may be feeling worse as the effects of a good economy begin putting pressure on your ability to keep the good people you have and to find new (good) people.

The Pacific Business News reports, "Businesses are being forced to spend more on employees ...in the hiring process and while working…" The author cites rising employment agency fees as well as increased costs of salaries and benefits, just to stay competitive in the heated pursuit of good people.

Meanwhile, the ones you see leaving may be just the tip of the iceberg. Some HR professionals suggest, for every highly talented person leaving a company, three others are preparing their résumés in the hope of finding greener pastures and 67 percent of currently employed workers surveyed recently said they would "rather be working somewhere else."

What is your approach to keeping your best people and lassoing more like them? If you can't roll a plan off your tongue like the names of your relatives, it's probably time to sit down and try to produce it in written form. Your success in the next few years is likely to depend on how well you implement your plan.

Begin with an assessment of your current situation:

• Do we know who our best people are?
• How do we identify them?
• Do they know how much we value them?
• How do they know?

Then, look to the future: what kind of people, how many, what skills and characteristics will we need in the next six months? In the next two years? In the next five?

When you have identified your needs, it's time to figure out how you will find them, identify them, attract them and keep them.

When you've created a written plan from all of this, you will find you lose less sleep at night wondering what you're going to do to replace the star performer who just left for a corner office at your competition. You will be able to focus your resources on a real, productive process with huge payoffs, perhaps sooner than you expect.

Implementation of your plan will require tools for assessing people, both current employees and potential recruits. You will need to both inventory what you have and measure additions against the templates you create in your plan. We refer you to the sage advice the Cheshire Cat gave Alice at the fork in the path. When Alice asked the Cat, "Which way do I go?" The Cat responded with a question of his own: "Where do you want to go?" Alice responded, "I don't know," and the Cat finished their conversation "It really doesn't matter, then."

As with planning your cash flow, your sales, your inventory and your physical plant, you must know where you want to go with your people - or it really doesn't matter which way you go.

Leadership is about taking personal responsibility for making things better, not expecting someone else to make things better for us. Farber writes, "At times, I admitted to myself, I did hope someone would protect me...that someone would lead me in my life.  It just sounded so much easier than the alternative which was being a leader myself."

Consider this real test for each of us:

Think about how many times we catch ourselves wanting someone else to make things better for us, instead of improving things for ourselves.

Balance is a process, not an event. Balance is a constant adjustment that demands awareness of when you are about to fall off the balance beam-o-life. Clue: when your son goes off to college and you haven't spent time with him since he was in Little League, you're out of balance. When the last time you exercised was right after Lance Armstrong won his first Tour de France, you're out of balance. You can be out of balance at work, too, if you're wearing too many hats, have embraced micro-managing, shun delegation and have an ego as big as Montana. But, in twenty years of presenting programs on Life Balance, I've never heard people complain that they are spending too much time with their families and just have to get in the habit of staying later at the office.

Your goal: be in perfect imbalance.

There are two legs on your perpetual journey to perfect imbalance. First, be aware of when you are off kilter so you can pull yourself back into balance, or alignment, with your priorities and goals. Second, be present and fully engaged wherever you are at the moment. When your body is one place and your mind is another, all areas get cheated by your divided attention.

The answer to improved balance includes three parts: Time management, stress management and communication. You must make choices. Repeatedly ask yourself, "What is the most important use of my time right now?" Then apply your energy and attention to that.

For those of you who live and die by your To Do list, here's a new version for you. Run through these six steps when you are feeling out of balance and about to topple.

Stop. Whatever you are doing, stop. Step back for a minute. Take a breath.

Huddle. Determine what your demands are. Remind yourself of your goals, mission, values and beliefs. Create a strategy to right yourself.

Choose. Your church building committee wants you to attend tonight's meeting. Your customer wants you to meet to discuss your services and Junior has the lead in the school play, which opens tonight. Depending on your values and priorities, you choose one. This is hard, because making a choice means setting the other options aside. Renegotiate the others.

Savor. Whatever your choice, really enjoy it. Engage all your senses to make sure you're fully present. What are the sounds, sights and smells around you? What textures do you feel? If you consume food or beverage, pay attention to taste and temperature. Get rid of the old "My body is at Grandmother Bessie's 100th birthday party but my mind is on the Johnson merger" routine. Kiss automatic pilot good-bye.

Play full out. Whatever you're doing, give it your all. Make sure 100 percent of you is in the game. Talking on your cell phone at Junior's debut is not efficiency. It's deficiency.

Go for management vs. control. You won't always make the right choice. Someone may be disappointed. You can't control the universe and the incompatibility of your Day-Timer with someone else's PDA. Make choices. Don't live by default.

Longing for balance in life is a dilemma of our times and culture. In Afghanistan or Ethiopia, people don't worry much about life balance. People in countries where survival is the main issue find it easier to prioritize than those of us who suffer an abundance of options. Only people with rich, textured lives have life balance problems. With all our opportunities, activities, commitments, alternatives and discretion, you could say we have created this problem for ourselves. The good news is that we can solve it ourselves, too. Make a choice to strive for perfect imbalance.

Karen Susman speaks internationally on Life Balance, Networking, Presentation Skills and Humor. For her books and more, visit www.karensusman.com or call 888-678-8818.

The obvious answer to attacking this challenge was to improve the hiring process so they decided to implement the Step One Survey II™, a prescreening assessment, as an aid to the hiring process.

Beginning in February of this year, all applicants were required to complete the assessment. With statistical input from their Profiles representative, they chose a set of selection criteria designed to eliminate the least desirable 40 percent of their applicant population before those applicants reached the interview stage. For those selected for interview based on the assessment and other available information (applications, etc.), the interview guide produced by the assessment formed the backbone of the interview. In six short months, they have reduced both their 30-day and 60-day new hire failure rates by just over 33 percent! (Figure 1)

In the process, HR and management staff are spending 40 percent less time on interviewing and have time to work on other important tasks such as continuing to improve customer service!

Managers have commented on improvements in attitude, attendance and work ethic, outcomes of selection of better employees, as well.

The data analysis has clearly shown the program is working to improve the hiring process, but has also raised a new and somewhat unexpected issue. Employees who scored nine on two or more scales were four times as likely to fail, as those with lesser scores! (Figure 2) Is it possible that these relatively rare individuals (who score in the upper three percent of the population on each of two or more scales) are somehow "too good" to stay on the job? Perhaps more to the point, what do you do about it? This topic will be the subject of future discussions.

Figure 1

Figure 2