Bart Gragg & Peter Krammer
Businesses in most industries are woefully short handed. Talking with our clients, we hear a similar story. They’re short on labor, skilled tradespeople, engineers, and managers. Where did everyone go, and why didn’t they stick around? Why didn’t the people who were sidelined by Covid return? Perhaps the answer has more to do with culture and leadership than the comfort of one’s sofa.
Hiring and retention are a single system, not separate processes. The all-too-pervasive attitude of, “Let’s just get them in here and we’ll figure out how to keep them later,” is a wasted opportunity that costs companies dearly.
The two most critical components of the hiring-retention system are culture and leadership.
Culture, otherwise known as “how we do things around here,” is defined by business processes, the relationships between team members and their managers, peers and direct reports. In every job, there are bound to be processes and procedures that you don’t agree with, but are willing to overlook. Chances are you aren’t going to leave a company based on a process you don’t like.
However, you will leave if you don’t like the relationship you have with your boss or the people you work with. Based on exhaustive research from Gallup and others, people don’t leave organizations—people leave people, and the person most likely to cause you to leave is your immediate manager.
Conversely, good managers are also the reason you’ll stay even when it seems the company is hell-bent on driving itself into the ground.
The relationships within an organization can be supportive, indifferent, or hostile —or some combination of those three. Healthy, supportive environments attract, engage, and retain people. Indifferent and hostile relationships drive people away in droves.
Where hiring and retention are concerned, leadership is about creating an environment for team members to engage, whether they are new or existing employees. Consider how you feel when you’re heard and supported versus when the boss or the team is indifferent or hostile toward you or others. How people make others feel makes a huge difference in their willingness to stay and be engaged.
We believe building, nurturing, and maintaining healthy relationship systems within an organization should be the leadership team’s No. 1 strategy for building the business. Otherwise, there won’t be anyone around to help.
