In my last post, I wrote about ‘Passion or Paycheck,’ and how it impacts executive team turnover. I had a few conversations with executives about employee turnover in general, and how what appears to be isolated decisions may in fact be linked together with a through thread. When a company is a visible leader in its space, it becomes a target for recruiters seeking to hire away the magic on behalf of competitors. It is easy for a leader to dismiss a string of employee decisions as independent choices that individuals are making for their own personal reasons. You can justify the exits as pursuing exciting new opportunities for career growth. After all, your company is doing well, so why else would anyone choose to leave?
In fact, before someone decides to entertain an opportunity to move on, they generally have a kernel of vulnerability. There is some reason nagging at them that creates an openness to the conversation. Frequently, the vulnerability grows out of assumptions about the company or thoughts about career opportunities internally or issues with one’s manager or department. Once again I turn to the words of Andy Grove from Intel, “Only the paranoid survive.” As the leader, your managers may tell you the exits are unavoidable and not connected, but after a few, your paranoia should kick in. No manager is going to come to you to acknowledge how their own failings may have led to employee exits, and yet we know that the single most determinate influence on employee satisfaction is their manager. If there is a cluster of exits in one area of the company, it is time to do some investigating.
Sometimes, there does not appear to be any pattern to the employee exits. They are popping up across different departments or areas of the business. It is easy to treat them as unfortunate random occurrences. But, healthy paranoia should prevail if the number of exits or the frequency seems to be changing. Companies are complex organisms with multiple pathways for internal communication. There are the formal channels that come from HR or leadership, but often the stronger pathway is the informal communication between employees - the rumor mill or grape vine. Like a waterway, if a poison is introduced someplace upstream, it will eventually flow downstream and contaminate everything. So too with the company grapevine. When someone expresses a negative or cautionary thought it will get passed around and ultimately creates a vulnerability for an individual far removed from the originator. Along the way, the ‘poison’ may have rattled an untold number of team members, and eventually it starts to manifest itself in a cluster of employee turnover.
I have written in the past about the concept of the Ladder of Inference. The idea is that when one individual jumps to an erroneous conclusion, the thread of thought gets amplified and expanded by a series of subsequent inferences that eventually blow up morale. The best example is a company that has a policy of having bagels delivered every Friday morning for the team to enjoy.
One Friday, the first employee to arrive notices that there are no bagels in the break room. They tell their friends and they start to speculate:
There are no bagels. I wonder if the company cancelled the perk and did not say anything?
What if they did not pay the bill?
Maybe they could not afford to keep giving them out?
I wonder if this is the only cut back?
I bet the next step is a hiring freeze and probably layoffs!
I had a call from a recruiter that I was ignoring, but maybe I should call back!
Wow, if there are going to be layoffs, I better get my resume out!
Let’s tell the others that the handwriting is on the wall!!!
Eventually, the admin in charge of the bagels shows up with a sign that says “Sorry, the bagels are late this morning because the delivery truck broke down. Please come back in an hour.”
In the absence of information, employees quickly climb the Ladder of Inference, and it takes clear corporate communication to de-escalate. Similar to the missing bagels, when team members see other team members leaving, they start to climb the ladder. FOMO (fear of missing out) leads them to suspect that the people leaving know something they do not know, and they do not want to be the last to learn whatever the dark corporate secret might be.
A leadership tool I learned years ago was to pay attention to the “Drift” in the company. Drift is the unwritten, unsanctioned sentiment that is floating around the halls and offices. Usually, it is the conspiracy theories and rumors that employees loosely know and rarely share with execs in a formal manner. As a senior executive, it is important to actively listen for the drift. What I found was that we could usually crowd source our understanding of the drift. Each senior manager and executive was able to pick up on some aspect of the drift. It may have been from conversations among members of their team about some other team, or offhand questions that seemed out of character. Everyone in leadership had a piece of the puzzle. To piece together the mosaic overall picture of the drift, we made time in leadership meetings to specifically talk about the drift. Each participant in the meeting shared their latest discovery, and as a leadership team we could put it together to build a picture of employee morale and trouble spots. It informed us of negative inferences that needed to be squashed, and of worries or concerns that were eroding confidence. The key was to make time to recognize and explore the drift, and then to address the issues in an open and frank manner in corporate communications.
As a leader, it is imperative to listen to your paranoia. Georg Lichtenberg an 18th century physicist said “One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.” Rather than ignore an uptick in employee turnover, acknowledge it and over communicate the facts in the face of the Ladder of Influence. Be open and tell the team that if they have nagging thoughts planting a kernel of vulnerability, they should start by confirming their assumptions. Provide the team with a safe mechanism to raise their concerns. It they see business issues, they should test their interpretation by speaking with a manager or executive.