WHY YOUR KEY EMPLOYEE JUST QUIT

If you believe all the headlines on the evening news or in the Wall Street Journal, you’d have to conclude that the US economy is continuing to struggle.  Unemployment remains stubbornly high.  Employers seem to be reluctant to hire new people to their full-time payrolls, even as corporate cash levels are at record highs.

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?

SEX, ETHICS AND BOSSES

An AICPA Economic Outlook Survey, which polls chief executives, chief financial officers, controllers and certified public accountants with executive roles in U.S. companies, found that businesses expect an increase in recruitment, staff training and spending in the next 12 months as economic conditions improve. Most of the executives questioned (56 percent) say their companies have the right number of employees, but 15 percent said they planned to hire immediately, up from 13 percent last year. Meanwhile the portion of those surveyed who said their companies had too many employees shrank from 10 percent to 8 percent.

Part of the problem with C level executives when dealing with employees, is that the employees don’t share nor understand the Type A+ personality of their bosses and they judge them harshly for it during tough economic times. Some mentioned that executives were thought to be ‘job slashers’ and lacked concern for their employees.  In fact, based on executives' own survey responses, they agree that they are getting worse at basic human interaction as the economy improves.

What’s the Disconnect?

A survey conducted last year by Booz Allen (BAH) found that executives largely believed the job was out of their hands and that they couldn't help their company achieve its’ goals. A full 64 percent said they had conflicting priorities, while 54 percent said they don't believe employees and customers understand their strategy.

That's bad news for companies where executives' capabilities in no way support the strategy. In that scenario, only 14 percent of such firms report above-average growth. It's particularly troubling when 64 percent of managers don't feel their company's strategy will lead to success.

Being Ethical

A study released last year by the Economist Intelligence Unit, titled "A Crisis of Culture: Valuing Ethics and Knowledge in Financial Services" found that executives in the financial services industry didn't see much to gain by conducting their business ethically. Does anyone remember the economic downturn of 2007-2008 which had a direct correlation from the securitization and purchase of ‘subprime’ mortgage loans?

Although 91 percent of those surveyed placed equal importance on ethical behavior and financial success, more than half (53 percent) think advancing their career would be difficult without being “flexible” on ethical standards. Only 37 percent believe their firm's performance would improve if employees acted in a more ethical manner.

While 97 percent of those same executives feel qualified to handle their job -- and 67 percent have raised awareness of the importance of ethics at their firms -- 62 percent of financial executives admit they care very little about what goes on in departments beyond their own. But many of those same execs think their own departments are an ethical breach waiting to happen.

Sexism

Harvard Business School professor Boris Groysberg and research associate Robin Abrahams reviewed interviews of nearly 4,000 C-suite executives conducted by the school's students between 2008 and 2013. Of those executives, 44 percent were women.

What is interesting is that 88 percent of male execs were married, compared with 70 percent of women. A full 60 percent of male execs had spouses who don't work full-time outside of the home, while only 10 percent of women did.

Most male executives saw work-life balance as women's work. Each side found it inconceivable that a man could pick up the slack, address work-life conflicts and actually contribute something other than money to the household. Meanwhile, the amount of stay-at-home dads has doubled since 1994.

What this review found is that executive’s contracts are locked-in and 16 percent said their company didn't have a succession plan in place and that it would take up to three years to find their replacement.

Conclusion

Executives have lost the trust and understanding from their employees, and therefore honest and open communication has ceased.  To engage employees, it is imperative that all executives and employees fully understand and embrace the strategic plan for the business.  It is no longer acceptable to point the finger and say it's management, and visa-versa. The real disconnect is the lack of accountablity, with shared core values and a common and shared goal.