Why are your people leaving? How can I stop attrition now?
So tell me, as the lead of your company, department, organization, team, are you having a problem with high turnover? Do you know why?
If you read the statistics there are dozens of reasons but if you listen to the workers there are usually only a couple and the most predominant one is, bad manager.
Does that mean there are a lot of bad managers out there? Of course! Tell me this, how did you learn to become a manager? Did you take a course that lasted several weeks? Months? Or did you receive any training at all?
Did your manager receive any real training? I am not talking about a three-hour seminar on being a good manager. I have taught those, I know how they work, I have gone into companies and tried to make my sales pitch to make their training months long with weekly feedback, hands-on experience with direct feedback. I have tried to set up reporting where the employees tell me the strengths and weaknesses of their boss. And the companies refuse.
But make that about sales and the companies go wild offering weeks of training teaching their sales staff how to close the sale. But what they miss is that just like reduced sales, turnover is a huge cost to companies. Probably of the greatest expenses a company can endure.
So then why don’t companies do something about their managers, train them, listen to their employees, find out what really is causing turnover.
I worked in a separate training unit in one organization and the employee training manager told me he was losing one-third of the staff every single year for the five years he had been at that organization. That’s crazy. And what was being done about it? Nothing. He knew it was because of poor management. He heard the stories. He went to his bosses and their bosses to ask that management training become mandatory to help reduce this terrible situation but to his chagrin the leadership always left it as voluntary training for their managers. When I left that organization he was still experiencing that same turnover two years later.
So tell me, why are your people leaving? Do you really know? If you are doing exit interviews and it’s their managers conducting it, you will never know the truth. And if it’s your HR staff that has not been properly trained to find answers by asking the right questions, listening and asking some more then you will still not find out the truth.
My course on Questioning and Listening helps everyone who attends, from sales people to management people to front desk people to receptionists and CEO’s to find real answers, keep the people who used to want to leave, and sell more products.
There is no secret to all of this but there is an intuition when you Question and Listen to your people.
I am Steve Sapato and I teach people how to be better so other people can feel and be better too.
steve@mentalprosperityblog.com
Great Managers Are Made Not Born 