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Most leaders think high turnover is a retention problem, but it's not. It's a leadership problem. And the fix is the exact opposite of what most leaders do.
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Welcome to the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. In a world where knowledge has become a commodity, this podcast is designed to give you something more access to the experience of a successful CEO who has already walked the path. So join your host, Martin Moore, who will unlock and bring to life your own leadership experiences and accelerate your journey to leadership excellence.
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Hey there and welcome to episode 404 of the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. This week's episode 8 Surprising Ways to Reduce Unwanted Turnover There's a pithy quote for every occasion in leadership. I can just visualize opening my fortune cookie and reading the words People don't leave organisations, they leave managers. Staff turnover is still widely misunderstood and most leaders operate from a place of fear, responding to it defensively. They tiptoe around their people, lower the standards and tolerate poor performance so that they don't rock the boat. But ironically, this is the worst thing you could possibly do for your retention problem. The real issue isn't turnover, it's the undesirable turnover that occurs when you lose the very people that you can least afford to lose and the team you're left with is full of tourists who are just along for the sightseeing. In this episode, I give you my views on how to frame the turnover problem. I look at an article from Harvard Business Review that confirms what great leaders have always known and I give you a practical framework that you can implement. Four things to stop doing and four things to start doing. Get these right and you won't just reduce undesirable turnover, you'll create an environment where your best people double down on their effort and commitment and the ones who shouldn't be there finally work it out and find another team to drag down. So let's get into it. When staff turnover is a problem, it it pushes many leaders into defensive mode. I see this regularly, all the way from CEOs down to frontline leaders. They start to operate from a place of scarcity. Their focus shifts. Instead of building what they want, they try to protect what they've got, even if what they've got is pretty ordinary. With this ultra conservative approach, a lot of things can go wrong and it ends up being a self fulfilling prophecy. When you're defensive, you tiptoe around your people for a variety of reasons. Maybe you're afraid they'll burn out and you'll be left short handed. Maybe you're worried about HR Violations and bullying claims. Maybe you think that it's critical to have someone in the role, even if that someone isn't performing well. The good news is, whatever you're thinking, you'll be able to justify it yourself pretty easily. We humans can rationalise pretty much anything. How many of you have caught yourself saying in the last six to 12 months? Say, my hands are tied because I'm not allowed to get rid of staff. I have to keep my team happy or they won't do what I ask them to do. It's too risky to take this person down the performance management path because they'll just go out on stress leave. I can't really do anything because I. I won't get support from above. All of this might be true, but whatever the justification, the outcome is the same. You choose not to stretch your people. You let them set the tone, the pace and the standard, and you convince yourself that you're keeping an equilibrium. Which I hope is probably true. But don't underestimate the consequences of not stretching your people. Your team's capability becomes continually weaker because people aren't growing. The standard drops because expectations are lower. The workload skews to the highest performers because the work still needs to get done. Those same high performers get sick of doing the heavy lifting because they watch tourists getting paid the same as they do. You experience an increase in undesirable turnover. That's the type of turnover where someone leaves who you wish had stayed. Your gene pool has weakened because for every top performer who leaves, there's a poor performer who's dug in like a tick, and everyone in between feels the gravitational pull towards the bottom, because that's the direction and the momentum of your team's culture. Have you ever seen this happen? Well, if not, you will. It's more common than you might imagine. We've been conditioned to believe that happy workers are productive workers, that simply by letting people do what they want, they'll somehow appreciate it and then they'll work harder. And it's so convenient for a leader because it means that you don't have to do anything difficult like holding people accountable for their choices. But the only thing I've ever seen it do is breed resentment and and entitlement in the very people who are given everything for nothing. This is why the secret to reducing undesirable turnover is a little counterintuitive. Remember, turnover by itself doesn't tell you much unless you look at the two different categories you have desirable turnover and undesirable turnover. There are Always people who choose to leave who you wish had stayed. And there's always people who choose to stay who you wish would leave. I was always focused on targeting the right turnover. I wanted my undesirable turnover to be as low as possible, and I wanted my desirable turnover to be as high as possible. I get asked occasionally what a good turnover figure is. For example, is 15% turnover rate good or bad? Well, I don't know. It depends. If 14% of that is desirable turnover and only 1% is undesirable turnover, that's awesome. But if it's the other way around and the vast majority of those people who left you wish you'd been able to keep, well, you've got a serious capability problem. Unless you think in those terms, your gene pool will naturally become weaker over time. The next two minutes are going to be very important to you. I'm going to give you the psychological frame that's going to help you to shift your focus from keeping people happy to stretching them for success. It was over a century ago that the Yerkes Dodson Law was first described. This is the relationship between stress and performance. What the research showed was that as you increase stress on any given task, performance improves. Obviously, once that stress becomes too much, performance starts to decline again. But you can't perform optimally without at least some level of stress. What I learned over many years of leading people was not only is that stretch necessary to get performance, but it's the thing that actually drives motivation. The older I get, the less certain I am about practically everything. But there's one thing I'm pretty sure about. All self esteem comes from achieving difficult things. Now just have a think about this. When was the last time that you felt absolutely unstoppable, invincible, bulletproof? I can virtually guarantee you that it was just after you'd done something hard, something you thought you might not be able to do, something that scared you, something that pushed you to your limits, either physically or mentally. Without that stretch, and without a little risk, there's no satisfaction at the end. When you stretch someone, a number of surprising things happen. The high performers are challenged and they thrive. The low performers are challenged and they leave. No one likes working in an environment where they can't be successful. Even the poor performers, they will self select. Awesome, right? That's an automatic increase in your desirable turnover. And when the high performers see that you're serious about upholding a high standard of performance, they double down on their own commitment. As a leader, I always felt it was my job to give someone the opportunity to stretch. Some wanted to and many didn't, but those who stuck it out ended up with incredible motivation. Their job satisfaction was through the roof and ultimately they had stellar careers. But that just doesn't happen organically. It takes a leader who cares enough to stretch their people. I've been banging this drum for a lot of years now, and it's something that many leaders say simply don't want to hear. Why? Because if they believe this, it means they have to lead their teams very differently from how they're leading them now. This is why it was so gratifying when I saw the article in Harvard Business Review this month titled Surprising Ways to Reduce Turnover in High Pressure, High Skilled Jobs. I'm going to paraphrase this article, including a few direct quotes for ease of conveying the messages. The article looks at turnover rates in the US hospital and healthcare system. In 2024, more than 287,000 staff nurses left their positions and nearly 1.6 million say they intend to leave their position within five years. In a field already facing staffing pressures, turnover can cause critical shortages. Now, conventional wisdom tells us that nurses are overworked and burned out, which might be true, but as the article points out, it's also incomplete. Their research paper, which was titled Operational Overload the Impact of Workload on High Skilled Workforce Attrition, confirms that over time and the emotional toll resulting from adverse clinical events increase the likelihood that nurses are going to leave. But there's a more useful insight. Not all job demands push people out. Some actually pull them in. These learnings don't just apply to nursing, but to other high skill, high burnout environments. Everything from advanced manufacturing and cyber security to air traffic control and financial trading. Two findings stood out. Overload drains people, but meaningful responsibility anchors them. Nurses were less likely to leave when they held greater primary responsibility for patient care. This was seen as a signal that they were trusted and relied upon. Aha. This is absolutely the moneyball right there. Stretching people doesn't mean shoveling more work onto their plate. It means giving them more accountability, greater freedom of choice, increased autonomy and stronger decision making rights. Accountability and empowerment who would have actually thought that this was the way to reduce undesirable turnover? It does require you to distinguish between simple overload and meaningful responsibility. The research concluded that when nurses are trusted with real responsibility, they feel more central to the work of the unit. Increased responsibility also signals that the organisation sees them as capable and important, deepening their sense of ownership. And in a setting like intensive care, where the Work is demanding and consequential. That sense strengthens commitment. Nurses feel the demands of the job, but the job is also meaningful. The second critical factor was co worker support. When nurses had support from their colleagues, it mitigated the negative impact of working for long hours under intense pressure. The article is really firm in its conclusion. Hospitals approach retention as a staffing shortage or compensation issue, but relying on those levers is unlikely to change anything. Leaders need to pay attention not only to how much work nurses do, but also to whether that work gives them a sense of ownership. And when the team is functioning well, that is their colleagues step in. When the pressure rises, the anchoring effect is incredibly powerful. Accountability, empowerment, meaningful work and high performing teams will always trump burnout and dissatisfaction in any industry. Alright, let's get practical. Here are some common steps that I think apply to any industry. Doing these things is going to lock in your highest performers and motivate the people who probably shouldn't be there to go somewhere else. I've broken this down into a list of do's and don'ts. There are four things you should stop and four things you should start. Now I'm going to lead out with the don'ts. Here are the things you need to stop. Number one Stop treating everyone the same. I originally wrote this point as Stop doing dumb shit, but I guess the dumbest thing you can do is to treat everyone the same. Look for the easy wins here. Spend more time with your best people. Stop rewarding poor behaviour or poor performance as if it's okay. I always made it abundantly clear that I intended to discriminate between team members based on merit, performance, behaviour and commitment to the job. Stop throwing more work at an overworked team. If you do that, you absolutely will burn them out. My approach in the corporate world was quite counterintuitive. Instead of constantly demanding that my team do more with less like most leaders do, I was constantly asking what I could clear off to improve their focus on the highest value initiatives. Do the few things that give you the biggest bang for buck and absolutely nail them. And stop any work that doesn't make an appreciable difference. Number three Stop making excuses for your worst performers. You may have a hundred reasons in your head why you can't get rid of your worst performers. Stop it. They need to go. And until they do, you'll never make headway on your retention problem. Your best people will eventually leave. I have never spoken to a leader who's regretted removing a poor performer. On the contrary, I've Heard the same six words hundreds of times over. I wish I'd done that sooner. Number four, Stop micromanaging. People need to feel as though you trust them and that they have autonomy. If you're constantly in their knitting questioning how they're doing their jobs and overriding their decisions, do you think they're going to feel trusted and valued until you get out of their way? They can't stretch. Leave the vacuum and watch them grow into it. That requires discipline from you. You've got to let go of the steering wheel and let them grab onto it. Until you learn to operate at your own leadership level, you'll continue to stunt your people's. Alright, now for the do's. Here are the things you need to start doing. Of course you may already be doing some of these and if so, that's excellent. Just treat this as confirmation that you should continue doing them. Number one, start giving people more control over their day to day work. Empowerment and accountability are two sides of the same coin. Without empowerment you'll never get true single point accountability. This is where you have to start if you want to drive execution excellence. Once people have everything they need in order to perform, that's when you can start to stretch them. That's when their satisfaction and their impact and their performance absolutely skyrocket. It's also when they become more committed and diligent and loyal to your business. Now, if you want the ultimate how to guide for empowering your people, have a listen to episode 27, unleashing the power of youf People. Of course we'll leave links in the show notes to our episodes. Number two, start focusing on the most important outcomes when you stop throwing more work at your overworked team. The flip side is that you need to focus only on the highest value outcomes. So for a start, you've got to work out what actually creates the most value. And then you need to be ruthless about stopping everything else. Just take a minute to think about this. If you absolutely nailed your top six highest value initiatives, do you think anyone's going to give a shit whether you get to number 43 or not? These strong leadership choices give your people the opportunity to succeed. Number three, start developing individual capability. If you want to stretch an individual, you have to know where they are now. You have to assess what their latent capacity and potential is and you've got to help them to bring that out. Of course you can't do that unless you know them pretty well. And getting to know them well doesn't happen over beers on a Friday. Afternoon. It happens in the leadership dialogue. All of those interactions, big and small, that help you to understand where that person is at once you know you can both take a bit of risk in a relatively safe environment. And finally, number four, start building a high performing team. In my experience, the research finding on co worker involvement is only meaningful when that involvement is high quality. That means that the team itself has to be a high quality team. Once you stop treating everyone the same and differentiate based on performance, you'll be heading in the right direction. But if you think you already have a high performing team, then I'd like you to challenge yourself. Go back and have a listen to episode 355, the new rules for High Performing Teams and see how your current team stacks up. Turnover is a function of how you're leading your people. If your undesirable turnover is high, there's a message in that. The recent article from Harvard Business Review confirms what no Bullshit leaders already know. People are happier and more productive when they're stretched, when they're valued as a critical part of your enterprise rather than just a cog in the wheel. If you work on the do's and don'ts from this episode, you you'll start to see the green shoots of progress relatively quickly. And there's one other thing. If your undesirable turnover is high, you need to stop blaming the market. Stop blaming hr, stop blaming your own people. Look in the mirror. That's the place where you're most likely to find the answer. Alright, so that brings us to the end of episode 404. I really hope you enjoyed it, but as I'm sure you know, listening is easy. Leading is hard. If you found this episode useful, please follow or subscribe to no Bullshit Leadership on your favourite podcast player. I'm looking forward to next week's episode nailing your mid year review. Until then, I know you'll take every opportunity you can to be a no Bullshit leader.