Managing Employee Retention & Burnout Risk

Employees Leave Their Managers

It is said that “employees don’t leave their organizations; they leave their managers.” In one study of 7,272 U.S. adults, Gallup found that 50 percent of employees left their job "to get away from their manager to improve their overall life at some point in their career." A 2019 DDI research corroborates that 57 percent of employees have left a job because of their manager. Furthermore, 14 percent have left multiple jobs because of their managers, while an additional 32 percent have seriously considered leaving because of their manager.

Marcel Schwantes in his 2019 LinkedIn article (The No. 1 Reason Why Employees Quit Their Managers ) says (and I quote), “I have interviewed hundreds of top leaders, leadership experts, scholars, Wall Street Journal and New York Times best-selling authors, to get to the bottom of the real reason people quit their jobs. The answer hasn't changed over the years. You can throw in pandemics, lockdowns, Great Resignations and inflations. The same reason always floats to the top.” The quality of the relationship between an employee and her manager.

Solution Lies with Managers

Managers, on the other hand, are often found complaining about the poor performance of their subordinates and while there are certainly other factors at play, at times it may be difficult for the line managers to realize that their subordinates’ or team members’ performance, motivation, and engagement may also be a direct result of the way they are being managed.

As a consultant and coach, I come across very competent managers who don’t fathom their own impact on employee morale, motivation & performance. My job is usually to first, sensitize them to good management practices, which is not about being ‘nice’, something most managers raise an eyebrow to. And secondly, to develop their competency to provide the necessary means and abilities to their employees for them to do a fantastic job.

Developing People Management Skills

A line manager’s core responsibility is to get performance out of her team. The team members must be coached, trained, empowered, and facilitated to get results. A manager must make that happen. This can be accomplished, on the job, by getting involved in various activities such as goal setting, expectations management, providing real-time feedback (based on how the manager observes the team member in action) and through coaching. The results usually follow.

Organizations, on their part, must ensure that when technically competent professionals are given people management responsibilities, they are equipped to lead and manage teams in a way that continuously allows for high levels of team performance and engagement.

In my experience, the following managerial practices provides the best ROI on garnering consistent performance and a sustained level of employee engagement.

Focus on Your Quality of Input

A manager provides her input in several ways such as setting collaborative, meaningful goals, managing and clarifying expectations, giving observations on behaviors and coaching for success, and communicating the big picture. When you see an employee struggling, the best question to ask of yourself is “What input from me will best help the employee move forward?” This can be in the form of coaching, suggestion, advice or direction.

Focus on Employees’ Progress

Most managers do a pretty good job of monitoring the progress of their teams. The challenge some managers may face is to differentiate between progress and performance.

I differentiate the two terms as follows: Performance is about the results an employee is able to achieve, it’s about reaching the milestones; while Progress is about how these results have been achieved, it’s about the efforts and contributions leading to the milestones. This is where the proverbial ‘rubber meets the road.’ When talking about performance, a manager’s behavior tends to be ‘evaluative’. When talking about progress, managers need to be ‘exploratory & developmental.’

In my experience, focusing on progress rather than performance is the second and equally critical managerial practice which provides the best ROI on garnering consistent performance and a sustained level of employee engagement.

During the year (or quarter), a line manager will have many opportunities to see her team members in action. Most often she would be able to track progress in her monthly follow-ups. Sometimes, she would receive feedback (from stakeholders, either negative or positive) and sometimes she would observe directly how team members operate. A manager’s observation of her subordinates, her feedback and coaching on how they go about getting their work done is an important, if not the most important, element in ensuring success in achieving goals. The key here for the manager is to be aware of which leadership and/or management style is appropriate for the given situation for the given team member.

Prioritize Your Time: Paying Attention to Your Employees

A manager’ s role has to be one of enablement. A manager needs to enable her employees, through various interactions, to focus on their capability and motivation to perform. A manager putting pressure on the employees can only get so much out of them before they burn out. Gallup research highlights that “employees need to believe that their manager will address their problems, and they need to feel like their manager genuinely cares about them as people. The best managers demonstrate that they care by investing in employees through awareness, time and attention.”

The result of a 2014 survey of 32,000 people from research firm Leadership IQ, published in Fast Company , suggests that as people rose from one to six hours spent with their direct leaders, they became 29% more inspired about their work, 30% more engaged (that is, likely to recommend their company as a great place to work), 16% more innovative, and 15% more intrinsically motivated (finding something interesting in most of their tasks).

People managers need to prioritize their subordinates’ time over their own. Most managers complain that they don’t have enough time to do that as they have their own tasks to accomplish. I usually offer them a rough calculation. Say you have a team of ten direct reports (DRs), and roughly, 220 working days per year, and you spend minimum one hour with each subordinate per month. That’s about 15 days. That’s roughly 7% of managers’ time. Is that too much to ask?

Summary

There are three principles and/or practices that I have experienced, that can enhance People Managers’ ability to retain their talented employees, reduce their burnout and keep them engaged while performing to the best of their abilities.

First, people managers, at any level of an organization, need to focus on the input they provide. Wrongly, some managers tend to focus on and put their efforts in, managing the results (the output). This effort does not serve the organization’s purpose. When managers shift their focus to who is getting the results, (individual employee or team) and expend their energies in ensuring that this person or team is made capable, day in and day out, of getting results, the game changes. Second, and equally important principle is that managers need to focus on employee’s and team’s progress. The managerial input should be on helping the employees progress, as they pursue their goals and targets. This requires a manager to understand the development needs of her employees/team at any given moment and address them appropriately. This leads to the third principle or practice; managers need to structure and prioritize their time for their employees in their schedule. An appropriate amount of time at a regular frequency spent with the DRs, to review progress, address challenges and providing guidance goes a long way in spelling success for the manager.