Nearly 70% of organizations worry about losing their best people, yet despite these concerns they fail to grasp what is required to hold onto them. Instead they meddle with those things that will drive people away.

Impossible? Hardly. You may be as guilty of this as anyone else.

Here’s an example.

A company hires someone to sell their products. That person does such a good job that pretty soon his / her compensation exceeds that of the managing director, CEO, or president. This causes the senior executives to rethink the commission structure. The end result is that the salesperson has to work harder from now on in order to earn the same amount of money as he / she did in the past.

Now put yourself in that person’s shoes. How many restructurings of the commission structure would you accept before you started thinking about leaving? One? Two? Three?? This is not new. It’s been going on for decades.

Or how about this scenario?

A team of people pull out the stops to deliver a bespoke solution to an important client in record time. They work late into the evenings and on weekends. All of the deliverables work flawlessly – exactly what the customer wanted. When the kudos are passed out, the department head accepts the credit. He / she may make an off-handed comment about his / her “team”, but the insincerity is palpable and the senior management makes no attempt to correct the obvious error.

The two examples illustrate how organizations overlook or ignore the value that their employees provide; and it’s that feeling that makes people want to leave. If you want people to stay, then you have to give them a good reason to do so. It starts with genuinely valuing them. They must know in their hearts that you truly appreciate them and what they do. It seems like such a small thing, yet it is the number one reason why folks want to leave.

There’s another reason why people want to leave.

It’s that they don’t respect their supervisors. This is not rocket-science. Herzberg discovered in the 1960s that people expect to have a good relationship with those that they work for. You’d think that a half a century later, managers would recognize this, yet it’s surprising how many of them don’t care. Is it any wonder that people want to leave when all they get is grief from their boss?

What’s another reason? It’s that the organization’s goals differ from the personal / professional goals of the people who work there.

Do you remember the days of Personal Development Plans?

Maybe you still use them. The operative word is personal. It’s about them. It’s about how you will help them to remain employable.

However flexible we’d like to paint ourselves to be, all of us would rather not change more than is necessary. We would like different results, but we would prefer not to pay the price that’s required to get them. That’s why the status quo is so easy to maintain. It’s the path of least resistance. That’s not a criticism of you. It’s simply a fact.

Now think about this. Although the people who work for you probably don’t want to move out, they do want to move up. They want to advance in your company. They are relying on you to tell them how to do that. And that means that your goals for them need to coincide with their own goals. Otherwise you’ll be working at cross-purposes.

As long as your employees believe that you have their best interests at heart, and that you’re committed to helping them to advance in your organization, they’ll stick around; but as soon as they suspect that you’re meddling in what matters to them, stringing them along for example with no intention of promoting them, they will look for a way out.

There’s no reason why you can’t work together on this. It’s not a contest – you against them. It should be a win-win. You should both be able to get what you want. You should be able to get the productivity that you desire, and your employees should be able to get the rewards that they are looking for, too.

There are other reasons why people want to leave. These are only three of them. The point is that you should be doing all you can to make people want to stay. If, however, you choose to meddle, then you shouldn’t be surprised when people start handing in their notice. Instead, you should expect it.

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