Who’s Paying the Price?

For the majority of folks who are investing their time into reading this, I’m guessing you need little additional convincing to ensure you’re being intentional about addressing each of the things that made the list of top reasons for turnover… But at some point in time, each of us will have someone on our team who holds leadership responsibility but hasn’t come to terms with just how important it is to take care of their people while they push for results. And if we’re being completely honest with ourselves, even the best servant leaders among us will still face times where the pressure to produce impacts the focus we have on our people at least slightly… Sometimes, this really boils down to having a crystal-clear understanding of exactly who’s paying the price for high turnover!

Several years ago while helping a friend recruit a few key people to his rapidly growing business, I learned something incredibly valuable through how he asked one simple question in the interview process. My friend drew several circles on a sheet of paper that each had one word inside; you (the candidate), his name (the owner), the company name, team, and customer. He then asked the candidate to point to which one the felt was most important in the overall picture. The circle they pointed to mattered far less than their explanation for their decision. The part that resonated with me the most was how the owner differentiated between himself and the company as a whole. He explained that in so many cases individual team members can see the company as this larger-than-life entity that exists outside of any of the names in the other circles. While it immediately made sense with regards to large corporations, I had never considered how much that idea applied to smaller, locally-owned businesses too.

My key take-away from that was that, in any business, every decision and action does indeed impact every single member of the organization. The challenging part, something that rarely happens, is ensuring that each member of the team has a clear understanding of how their daily behaviors and responsibilities have a direct impact on “the company” as a whole, their own livelihood, and each individual around them. When it comes to how high turnover kills our profitability, especially for those of us who have accepted the responsibility for leading a team (not just managing a department by cracking the ole whip), it’s critical that we understand how the cost of high turnover ultimately touches everyone in the organization in one way or another! 

There are indeed decisions that are made at a “company” level that dictate things we’ll need to do in our roles or how we’ll need to handle certain situations but even then, those decisions are driven by people; the “company” isn’t a self-perpetuating entity with a life of its own… The approach we take in those situations plays a significant part in how any given team member resonates with those reasons that cause high turnover. And while the cost of that turnover is a price the “company” pays, it’s also a price that cascades down to us as leaders, every individual on our team, as well as the customers we serve.

To make matters worse, this cost isn’t isolated to just the human resource team’s budget; it spills over into several other critical parts of our business, some parts that are tracked closely on a daily basis and some that are often considered intangible because of the difficulty in measuring them. Moving forward, we’ll dig into several of the other areas that are impacted, then we’ll work through a list of specific things we can each do to give our best people every reason to stay!