Why Great Managers Still Lose Great Employees

Things are aligning, the team is hitting all their goals, and your department is finally making a big change in the right direction for the organization. Then your star employee drops the two-week notice.  

If you're a manager, you've probably been there. 

It's not a great feeling to learn that you're losing your best team member. Along with the headache of rehiring or redelegating responsibilities comes the impending question,  

"Was there anything I could have done to make them stay?" 

While pay packages and opportunities for growth are key drivers in the realm of employee retention, many companies and HR leaders often forget the less tangible things that retain employees: the environment they create.  

Good intentions don't always cut it.  

As an HR leader, the task of creating a welcoming and supportive environment is often a top priority. When employees feel their best, they perform at their best, right? 

While the old adage, "Treat others how you would like to be treated," can somewhat ring true, for managers, it's important to note there is much more nuance there. Here's a hypothetical we can use to better explain this. 

Imagine a manager who values independence. They prefer the space to work things out on their own and don't necessarily like corporate structure forced on them. As a courtesy, they give their team the same freedom, but one team member needs clearer direction and more frequent check-ins to feel confident.  

After some time, the team member becomes disengaged because they feel they aren't set up for success. Although the manager thinks they are being empowering, they are actually unnecessary stress for some of their team and causing them to slowly disengage.  

A main driver of the mismatch between intentions and results can be found in workplace Needs. Needs represent what we expect from the world around us. The manager in this anecdote sees the independence as freeing while the team member see's it as a complete lack of structure and clarity.  

When it comes down to it, it's easy to see how perception plays a major role, especially in the manager-employee relationship.  

How perception shapes the employee experience. 

We may have never had the words to express it, but perception is what shapes the experience we have every day. You work a bit faster because you dread missing a deadline, while another sees that as reckless and potentially damaging to quality. 

How we perceive the environment and the people around us helps shape these judgements and experiences, which contribute to an employee's overall satisfaction.  

Understanding how perception plays a role can give you a better understanding that not everyone thinks alike.  Drawing back to the previous example, we can connect Birkman's Insistence Component to how the perceptions were mismatched.  The manager most likely had a low Insistence Need, which would help explain why they don't feel the need for structure. Meanwhile, the team member most likely has a high Insistence Need that was going unmet. They expected structure, and without it, they became disengaged as a result and fell into what we call Stress Behavior. 

When the two styles are at odds, the perception of the team member is going to shape how they feel about the position or organization. It's up to the manager to help shape this perception and account for the Needs of the employee, rather than the other way around.  

Employees disengage before they leave 

When an employee goes long without their Needs being met, it begins to shape how they show up to work too. Rather than working as their best self, it's easy to begin to fall into Stress Behaviors that are often unproductive and lead to conflict, disengagement or turnover.  

Though retention is, to a degree, inevitable, the patterns leading to that final "I quit" are often addressable but not seen by the managers.  

Closing the gap. 

To close this gap, the need for self-awareness becomes apparent.  Managers can't address and meet their employees where they are without understanding their own leadership style and tendencies. Having a greater understanding of their own tendencies alongside their teams creates opportunities to address and recognize misalignments between work styles.  

This is exactly what The Birkman Method was meant to do. Create conversations to help people better understand themselves and the people around them. With that understanding, you're able to react and recognize how to best work with differing personalities and work styles.  That awareness gives managers the ability to move beyond good intentions and meet individual employees where they are to get the best out of them.