Do bad leaders really drive away good employees?

There used to be a time when exit interviews weren’t a thing.

It used to be that Joanna in accounts would simply pop her head into her boss’s office, hand over a slim white envelope containing a letter of resignation, work her notice and then, a month or so later, walk out of the door for the last time, carrying a box with the work-related goods and chattels she had accumulated during her time with the company.

Her boss might then place an ad, go through a recruitment process and Joanna would become John and life would trundle on, Joanna’s departure the soon-to-be-forgotten ripple effect of a butterfly beating its wings somewhere in the corporate ecosystem.

In the good-old-bad-old days no one would know that Joanna left because she felt unrewarded, or because she felt she couldn’t progress further … or that her boss was an absolute monster.

And then there came a time when companies began to take an interest in why the Joannas of the world were leaving their jobs, and someone came up with the bright idea of asking them. The exit interview was born.

What business discovered was, perhaps unsurprisingly, that people leave companies for all sorts of different reasons – but one of the most common reasons for good people to leave an employer is that they are led badly.

There’s an old saying that people don’t leave companies, they leave employers, that they don’t quit jobs, they quit bosses.

This is clearly hyperbole of the highest order. People leave jobs and bosses they love for many good reasons – lack of opportunity, a dream role, work/life balance that a business just can’t accommodate and more besides.

But it’s certainly true that poor leadership is responsible for more than its fair share of employment churn. So, what is the real effect of that on business?

Well, to begin with good people make money for businesses. Even employees who, on the surface, have no direct and tangible link to income add value to the bottom line simply by helping their company offer more efficient or better service.

But losing good people also costs business money. In my last blog about the mistakes businesses make in their recruitment processes I referred to the cost of a bad hire (around 30% of the hire’s annual salary, on average – or between £9,250 and £11,125 if we’re talking pure numbers).

The cost of losing a talented employee is potentially even higher than that, because not only do you as a business leader or manager have to invest profit in recruiting people to replace those employees, you’re also not guaranteed to appoint someone who adds the same level of value.

Losing good people to poor management is especially frustrating because it’s so unnecessary.

Very occasionally bad leadership is down to mean-spiritedness. Sometimes it’s down to incompetence. Often, it’s down to ignorance. But mostly it’s down to a lack of training.

I think that in the majority of cases poor leaders are good leaders who just haven’t been taught how to be good at what they do.

Training and development of managers and leaders is a subject for another time and another blog, but whichever way you slice it, poor leaders definitely do drive away good people (just as poor people can drive away good leaders).

Part of the answer to this is obviously for businesses to invest more heavily in leadership training – there are many really good courses out there for companies that are serious about helping their senior people to get the best out of their teams.

However, business owners also need to look at their recruitment and progression strategies if they are really to crack the nut of effective leadership.

Lazy development planning – or, worse, a total absence of development planning – is often at the heart of poorly performing leadership teams.

Someone leaves and the easiest thing in the world is to promote the next most senior person in that team of department, even though they may not have the right skills or experience for the job.

The biggest mistakes in leadership are made when those making decisions that directly affect their direct reports are out of their depth.

And even in the forward-thinking environment of the modern workplace, the Peter Principle – where a person is promoted to the level of their own incompetence – is alive and well and thriving.

Businesses that are truly serious about retaining their best people should look seriously at how they recruit and then train their leaders – because when you get that right, you have a better chance of getting everything right.

If you’d like to find out more about how Constantia Consulting can help your HR team or business to nurture great leaders in your workplace, please get in touch for an informal chat.