How leaders ruin employee retention

What drives retention? Leaders: the flesh and blood humans in charge. From managers to CEOs, the boss has a huge impact on retention. For all the bells and whistles we create to drive engagement and ensure retention, it won’t mean a thing if an organization’s badly led.

We are a social species. We evolved from small tribal bands whose very survival depended on a good leader — one mistake by the caveman in charge and we’d be ripped apart by a saber-toothed tiger. That instinct remains in our DNA. So if your organization is bleeding talent, ask your employees how they really feel about the person in charge. If any of these traits crop up in their answers, you’ve got a leadership problem on your hands.

1. Not Credible

If the common reaction to a leader’s directive is incredulity or a face-palm, forget about alignment. You can’t get employees to sign on with hearts and minds to the organizational mission if the boss is clearly not mission-ready, or appears oblivious to problems that simply must be solved. There’s plenty of debate about whether or not a CEO should be from the field, but if not, they should still have the wisdom to turn to experts for guidance.

2. Conservatism

Not politically, creatively. The future is AI, VR and cars that fly and drive themselves. Our economy, transformed by digital and global changes, now thrives in a state of constant transformation and runs on disruption. Disruption is how we grow. If a leader can’t see tomorrow’s forest for today’s trees, the most ambitious stars will leave. Employees, particularly younger ones, perceive stagnation as death. And if you’re going to try to align employee engagement with organizational mission, don’t make the mission to not grow.

3. Recklessness

Granted, we want our leaders to reach for the stars. But there’s the appeal of someone driven by ambition, and then there’s the terror struck by someone clearly engaged in reckless at-all-costs behavior that risks everything and everyone. If employees perceive a CEO is driven enough to destroy his own firm, they’re going to jump ship before they’re forced to drown.

4. Alienating the Top Ranks

Look around you: are offices empty? Uber lost eight high-level people in two months. A leader who alienates the inner circle will trigger an exodus down the ranks as well, just less publicly. As senior execs leave, there’s a palpable crisis of confidence.

5. Inflexible

Deloitte’s 2017 Millennials survey found a strong connection between a culture of flexibility and employee retention. In organizations with a highly flexible working environment, 35 per cent of employees imagined leaving within two years (35 per cent), a mere two points above the 33 per cent planning to stay over five years. But for companies that don’t offer flexibility, there was an 18 point gap (45 per cent versus 27 per cent). The takeaway: a flexible company culture is shaped by its leaders. How many employees represent 18 per cent of your company?

6. Tone-Deaf

There’s a difference between tough and tone-deaf. What happened to Dr. David Dao recently at the hands of United Airlines was bad enough — and revealed a badly flawed organizational culture in which employees have few options for dealing with sticky situations. But when the CEO made the decision to congratulate his employees for their actions, he demonstrated remarkable cluelessness that’s going to cost the company as well as its employees. The health of an airline depends on its customers.

Stay tuned.

7. Bad Ideas

When a leader won’t let go of a really bad idea — stack rankings, a blood-testing startup reliant on fake results, stealing technology — collateral damage spreads fast. You don’t just lose talent, you lose the prospect of their coming back. Seventy-six percent of HR pros see value in hiring back boomerang employees, according to a Worktrends survey, and nearly half of millennials consider returning to former employers.

Boomerang employees are an asset in today’s workforce with a distinct advantage, including familiarity with company culture and mission, and the added benefit of what they learned while away.