The Supervisor Revolving Door: An Informal Analysis

Folks, many of you may remember I conducted an unscientific poll of "supervisor tenure" several weeks ago. What follows is my similarly unscientific analysis of the results; I am sorry it took so long to publish this!

But first some context. There’s an old saw in the “employee retention” industrial complex that goes something like this: “People leave their managers, not their companies.” For instance, aa 2019 DDI poll found that 57% of employees left a job to get away from a bad manager, other surveys effectively support this fact; most would regard it as non-controversial. Through a different lens reads this article from HBR which may not blame managers for attrition, but rather managers' failures in designing good jobs.

Moreover, recent surveys, e.g., from the Gallop organization show that employee engagement is less than 35% and that employees blame their supervisors for this. In fact, I recommend reading the Gallop report (or a short summary here) as it starts getting specific about what supervisors are doing wrong. The stark reality is that employees perceive that their bosses often lack the training to engage them well on the job. What’s more is that even many managers are disengaged, for instance, according to the Gallop State of the American Workforce report, only 38% of managers and executives are engaged. If you de-average this, you find that while 45% of executives are engaged, only 29% of managers are.

Going one step further, there is a plethora of advice articles in the business press, e.g., HBR, Forbes, Inc on how to deal with new supervisors. The actual time and work it takes to get a new supervisor onboarded to you as an employee is probably highly variable given a situation, e.g., is the boss new to the company, is their role different, how well do they know members of the team, but the general sense is that it takes months for a new boss to become effective.

Moreover, while research indicates a typical employee will change jobs 12 times in their lifetime, I have struggled to find out how many different managers an employee will have in their career. My failure here is not for want of looking or asking a few experts.

So enter the informal LinkedIn poll I performed, and thank you dear network for your contributions to cutting-edge management science. Here is what you told me, with N=215:

Question: Over your career, how long, on average, did you work for each one of your supervisors before either you or they moved on?

As you can see, the mode is that you have a new boss every 1 to 2 years. In fact, this aligns with my personal experience, my number is 15 months. My surprise is that if you asked me what my average supervisor tenure was before I actually sat down and ran the numbers, I probably would have said, "Oh, 2 to 2.5 years." Apparently, l was not alone in this misperception, as one of you commented. For color, one LinkedIn commentator observes that she best remembers the supervisors who had a positive impact on her career. Perhaps I subconsciously estimated with this in mind. Frankly, this is not a bad bias to have as you look back into your past.

I did one other deep dive on my own history (and recall, this is N=1). I found that of my 15 supervisor changes, they broke down as follows:

7 were supervisor turnover (supervisor voluntarily or involuntarily left the company or their role and was replaced)

4 were as a result of re-organizations

4 were as a result of my leaving a company or job and taking on a new one

More than 2/3 of my supervisor churn was not by my choice. Arguably, this is an underestimate, as not all of my company departures were my choice, either. Even if I back out these 4 "Geoff-driven" changes, I still averaged a new boss every 20 months. From your comments, some of you also seem to resonate with this math.

Going back to the network poll, what is particularly scary is that 1 in 12 of us have had a new boss less than once a year as an average over our entire career. I have had stages in my career where it seemed like a revolving supervisor door, matching this torrid clip. I know what this is like: In my experience during these phases, my supervisor never actually gets up to speed. My heart goes out to those of you who had to endure this your entire career. Ouch.

The rapid turnover in supervision is fraught with risks. For those 52% of us with less than 2 years on average boss tenure, that means that a significant portion of each boss’ relationship with you was essentially getting up to speed. For much of your boss’ tenure, it is quite possible that neither of you enjoyed the benefits of a mature working relationship. Your supervisor might have been in a position where they needed to make rapid changes to the organization, lacking adequate business, organizational, and personal context to do this effectively. One can assume this can lead to severe damage to employee engagement if not done well. I have been there myself, I remember being told more than once: “Geoff, welcome to your team, You have 60 days to make organizational changes. Put something on my calendar for April to review.”

What’s more, by switching bosses so often, we are playing a game of Russian roulette. Recall from the Gallup survey that on average, likely only 1 in 3 of your supervisors were engaged. Moreover, many of them may have had rather less training in being a boss than we might like. Many companies do not have rigorous fact-based methods of screening new employees including managers and executives, during recruitment. The potential for having some difficult supervisor situations seems scarily high.

Those of you who for the most part have enjoyed boss tenures of longer than 2 years (and there are 48% of you!), I hope that this has tied to greater engagement and satisfaction. I would be curious to hear your reflections in the comments below. If I think about the situations I have served under a boss for more than 2 years (I have a few of those!), I was generally very happy and engaged. That being said, there are probably reasons why someone would labor for years under a terrible boss. This is probably a question for another network poll!

So, returning to the 52% of us who have had relatively high boss turnover and those of us who are going through a "revolving door period", what do we conclude and what do we do about it? I’ll start by positing with my limited data that this is a systemic issue. Companies need to improve processes for recruiting, managerial training, and collaboration. Doing these 3 processes well should reduce the likelihood of misfit new hires, continuously improve the capabilities of managers, and reduce the ongoing restructurings which tend to be strong drivers of the supervisor revolving door. Collaboration in particular is an item which I sometimes see to be a challenge in large corporations; different units fail to transparently align objectives and insist on effective and efficient cross-functional ways of working. The accumulated impact of missed deliverables, stress, and frustration due to this failure often leads to organizational changes. And this leads to supervisor churn.

Focusing on systemic issues is not a path to better our individual professional satisfaction and engagement. What can each of us do individually? There is plenty of good advice articles out there, for instance look here and here.

While I might not want to try to summarize a number of thoughtful pieces to the point of hopeless generalization, I’ll try to do it anyhow. I really think the common threads in these articles boil down to these 3 concepts:

Listening. If you are an employee listen to your boss’ needs, assess the organization and how well your boss fits in. If you are a boss, as much as you can listen to what your employees are saying. Be super persistent. The best insights take time and trust to prise out.

Planning. Understand based on the needs—whether it be your boss or your new team—what needs to be done and when. Really put time into his and have the right empathetic discussions with your new supervisor. Where I have failed with new bosses is in missing somewhat subtle needs that should have occurred to me at the time.

Enrollment. If you are a boss, transparently enroll your team as much as you can in your onboarding process. Your people will know you are new but will feel better if you are transparent about your learning curve. If you are an employee, enroll your boss in your work; give them a stake. Transparently shared goals are a key to any kind of productive relationship.

Ok, so against my better nature I tried to summarize. I recommend you read the articles and maybe survey the literature out there for yourself.

My dream is that we can accomplish a world of better employee engagement, satisfaction, and productivity. I believe the supervisory relationship is a key part of this. The fact that there are no really good statistics that I can find on how often people get new supervisors might be a good gap to close. Thanks for helping with his micro-project, at least in a little way. I look forward to your comments!?