Pushing good people out the door
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Diane Stafford's syndicated column recently reported on research by Leigh Branham. Branham is the owner of Keeping the People Inc. and the author of 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave and Keeping the People Who Keep You in Business. Here's an excerpt from the column.
"The springboard for his specialty was getting access to about 19,000 exit interviews conducted from 1999 to 2003 by the Saratoga Institute, a third-party interview company.
From 2004 to 2008, Branham conducted his own minisurvey, taken by people who visited his Web site at keepingthepeople.com. It attracted just 256 responses, a drop in the bucket compared with the Saratoga data, but it was enough for him to draw some updated conclusions."
Branham thinks that workers have lost faith in top management, because they think that "senior leaders are looking at them as commodities, as costs, rather than assets."
No kidding. Just read the news and you'll see company after company laying off the people and shredding the relationships that make for long term competitive advantage. But it's OK, they think, because it makes the quarterly results look better.
Remember Circuit City? Remember how they got rid of their experienced salespeople so they could save money? Then you should also remember that their in-store add-on sales dropped like a stone because rookies didn't know enough to sell the products, agreements and service plans.
The initial impact on quarterly results was great. The impact on the long term was pretty awful.
Branham notes that "the sense of loyalty is pretty much gone." What he means is "gone from the workers." It's been gone from the C-suite in most companies for at least a decade.
The big insight I got from Stafford's report on Branham's work is this.
"Workers leave because of pushes — not because they were pulled away by better job offers.
The push factors, according to his survey, included feeling that the company didn’t care about workers’ personal development, that the overall corporate culture was unhealthy, that workers were treated unfairly, that the work was unchallenging, and that teamwork was flawed.
Only a tiny percentage of workers quit because of voluntary decisions to change careers, return to school, relocate, retire, raise a family, or to start a business."
Think about that. When good people leave, it's usually your fault.
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Wally,
This is a powerful message--and totally consistent with what I'm seeing "out there" in everyday practice.
Earlier today I received a call asking if I knew of a candidate for a position from which the incumbent is retiring. I know the incumbent: he's not "retiring." He's eligible for a retirement package and has chosen to leave for the reasons stated in your post and the research mentioned.
He has no particular place to go, isn't worried about money, and wants to continue using his expertise, which is quite deep. He will and another organization will benefit--unless he senses yet another commodity mentality.
Thanks for this one. . .
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Steve - Thanks for the comment and the example.
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Wally,
A great entry and one which totally rings true from my perspective as well. I firmly believe that companies create reasons for employees to want to leave. Even those that are approached by recruiters wouldn't consider the alternative if they felt that the push factors you highlight didn't exist. I find that those that are happy stay, while those that are less than happy, leave when the opportunity arises.
Great to hear this powerful reminder to do all that we can to keep our teams happy,
Nina
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Thanks for those perceptive comments, Nina.
Another aspect is that sometimes those who are "pushed" don't leave. They stay, grumpy and unproductive until they're pushed out by firing. That's not good for anyone or any company.
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As I was looking at the comments to my post I remembered that there's an excellent chapter in Michael Lee Stallard's book, Fired Up or Burned Out titled "Delete what Devalues."
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Great post Wally - precisely reflecting what I see every day. Micheal Feiner expressed it so elegantly: "People join great companies and leave bad bosses."
One day, in an impossible future, both employers and jobseekers will realise that pretending to be what you are not is no way to fill a vacancy. Both sides need to be fitted with Pinocchio noses.
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Thanks for stopping by, Rowan and adding that recruiting perspective. I hadn't considered that. When recruiters are compensated based on making the numbers and not the long-term fit of the people they recruit, they, being human, are likely to seek to maximize income and leave the "fitting" to line managers.
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