So, you would probably be surprised to know that more
Americans are quitting their jobs today than at any point in the past 4
years. In March 2014, 2.475 million
Americans quit their jobs. This has been
steadily increasing recently from a low in late 2009 (just after the financial
collapse finally bottomed out) from a monthly rate of 1.7 million quits a
month. Why are almost 2.5 million Americans a month these days – or about 30
million a year – willing to quit their jobs?
People Quit Bosses,
Not the Company
If you want to keep the most talented members of your team,
it’s time you started looking in the mirror and realize the biggest reasons why
people quit have to do with You.
1.
Have you overloaded your best people with too
many responsibilities? A lot of
companies in America, there have been waves of layoffs over the past 6
years. In cut after cut, there’s a
constant job staffing question: how do we get the same amount of stuff done
with fewer employees to do it? The simple answer has been to get the remaining
employees to do the jobs of 2 or 3 old employees, in addition to the regular
job responsibilities they used to have.
And then a lot of bosses never revisited staffing responsibilities 3 or
4 years later. It’s time to take a fresh
look at who is doing what in your group and probably redistribute how work is
getting done on the team. Your best
people need to be doing higher level stuff, not just getting lower level stuff
done. Your best people will quit if
they’re just continuing to be asked to do the same boring stuff years later.
2.
Are you a micro-manager? A lot of bosses get promoted because they’re
perfectionists. They were able to get a
lot of work done in their old jobs to get noticed. Now, in their new jobs, they keep wanting to
make sure that whoever’s doing their old job is doing it just as well as
them. Plus, they are into all their
direct reports’ business as well. Having
your fingers on the pulse of what’s going on (or not going on) in your group is
good management. But, at some point, you
cross the line into micro-managing. Your
worst people are probably happy for you to tell them what to do
constantly. But your best people will be
driven up the wall by this tendency.
They want to know you give them a task and then enough rope to let them
do it rather than doing it for them.
3.
You’re never around. The opposite of a micro-manager is a drive-by
manager. This is the boss who’s
perpetually never in the office. They’re
not around. They don’t check in. They give you a job to do and then check back
with you 3 months later on if it’s done yet.
Lots of bosses protest that they have an “open door policy” for their
people to come in and talk with them whenever they need to. But, if you’re never around or – when you are
– you zip in to grab something off your desk and zip back out or get on a
conference call for an hour and then take off to a meeting, that’s not going to
invite a lot of your staff to come in and shoot the breeze with you.
4.
You’re not in touch with how some of your hires
or promotions are driving your best people nuts. It’s human nature to want to be around other
people we like and trust. Why would we
choose to be around – and hire – people we dislike and don’t trust? However, we usually like people who like
us. Even though we think we’re good at
spotting people sucking up to us, it’s awfully tough when you’ve got a direct
report telling you how great you are.
Big problems arise when we promote based on who we like instead of on
merit. One promotion or hire like that
is ok, but two or three can sabotage a team’s morale. If you’re out of touch with who’s really
talented on your team and who you’re promoting or hiring, it’s a matter of time
before your best people tender their resignation. Why stick around if the bozos
get promoted?
5.
You’ve never given your people a sense of where
they can go in their careers. Nobody
takes us aside out of college or even in business school and teaches us how to
sit and talk with our direct reports about upward career progression. As a boss, most of us just want to make sure
all our work gets done. But how much do
you care about getting that next promotion? It turns out that your people care
about it just as much. So take the time to talk to them individually. Ask them
where they want to go in their careers – it turns out many won’t have a clue
but will appreciate you showing an interest.
Talk to them about how they can get there, including what kinds of
experiences and successes by them would make them stand out to your bosses.
6.
You run terrible meetings. Even one of the most successful CEOs in the
world today, Google’s Larry Page, wasn’t born with a keen understanding or
respect for being a good boss as this account describes. Page - a former doctoral student at Stanford,
when he started Google – thought the ideal way to run meetings was to instigate
a big argument among a team. Whoever had
the best idea, he thought, would rise to the top. Instead, he created anarchy and a lot of hurt
feelings. There are plenty of other way
to run ineffective meetings including never calling them or letting them go on
and on with no real action items coming out of them. All these approaches are tremendously
morale-sapping.
7.
You communicate that you care more about
yourself than the team. As a leader,
you’ve got to show your reports that you have done in the past or would be
willing to do now anything that you’re going to ask them to do. If you seem above it, you’re likely going to
turn their support away from you. You’re
going to communicate to them that you care more about yourself than you do
them. It’s tough to win back their
support after that. So, show them that
you care about their career progression more than your own. Show that you want
the team to win more than you want you to win.
8.
You’ve never given them the big picture vision
of where your group is heading or you are constantly changing the big
picture. Some bosses are great at strategy
but they’ve got their head stuck in the clouds or like to change the group’s
strategy every quarter. Some bosses are
about as strategic as a banana. Either
extreme is bad and debilitating for your staff.
As a boss, you’ve got to tell the group where their North Star is, the
direction they’re heading in and why.
Then, you’ve got to give them everything they need to get there. Sometimes business conditions change and the
strategy changes, but that should happen infrequently. If you worked for yourself as a direct
report, what would you think of the strategic direction you’re setting?
