Most organizations are solving the wrong retention problem. Retention is not about keeping everybody. It is about protecting the people who perform, live the culture, and drive results.
When leaders tolerate chronic underperformance, bad attitudes, and pot-stirring behavior, they do not create compassion. They create a hidden tax on the very people they cannot afford to lose.
In this video, you’ll discover that:
– Quality retention beats blanket retention. The goal is not to keep every employee at all costs. The goal is to retain the contributors who strengthen culture, serve customers well, and move the organization forward.
– Development is a retention strategy. Roxanne Emmerich points out that executives stay where they see a path to improve their capabilities and their value. Cutting development may look practical in tough times, but it can quietly push your strongest people away.
– Unaddressed dysfunction drives turnover. Nearly half of employees say they would leave rather than continue working around disruptive, underperforming people. Protecting high performers means confronting the behaviors that drain them.
If you want stronger retention, stop asking how to keep everyone. Start asking whether your culture is worthy of your best people staying.
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We have this concept of employee retention all wrong.
That it doesn’t really matter. Let’s take that right out, and let’s start with a much more clean understanding. We need the best people who are performing retained.
And so we need to make sure we have the quality retention, those who are performing, those who live by the culture. We don’t want everybody hanging around that’s being disruptive, that’s stirring the pot, that’s causing a problem, and that are creating so much chaos for those who are doing the hard work. So let’s get our head around that concept first. Now that said, this other group, we need to grow people from this area if they are willing to take the journey to become someone who is not disruptive and if they’re willing to learn how to be someone who is contributing to profit and contributing in the organization.
Because this group really matters. They’re the ones that pay the bills. They’re the ones that take care of the customers. They’re the ones that you can’t live without. And those are the ones that we must retain. So let’s think about it first of all in terms of, you know, is this the retention that we want? Is this quality retention?
Then from there, what matters? Well, we did our national research study of performance culture, and we asked executives what’s the most important thing that keeps you in an organization?
What they said is pretty surprising. They said it’s that they’re given an educational path to continue to improve their abilities and their employability. Well, isn’t that interesting? During difficult times, organizations oftentimes think about, well, we’ll cut this and we’ll cut that. And the first thing they cut is anything that develops their people. Yet your executives are some of the most important people for you to retain.
And we have to find a way to not only develop them, but develop them again with masters who understand how to increase their results so that they walk away not just having finished a course, but transform somebody’s world in terms of the results that they’re getting. So that’s what’s important to executives in terms of what’s the most important to them. For everybody in terms of retention, we have to be thinking that, you know, they’re all wanting education. Regarding most other employees, forty-eight percent said that they will leave a company if they have to work around somebody who is a pain to work around, underperforming, bad attitudes, they are intolerant of that. And so isn’t that interesting that forty-eight, half of them, will leave you because you’re not dealing with somebody that you need to be dealing with who’s causing problems in that organization.
So listen, I would rather give a kidney to somebody than fire them. I understand it. It hurts my soul when I have to say goodbye to somebody and say you’re no longer welcome on this team. It is heartbreaking. It is crushing to every bone in my body. I get how painful that is. And I have learned to reframe that such that I now think about that I need to protect my high performers from the chaos.
Because if I don’t deal with that situation, then these good performers have time robbed away from their time with family and friends. And that’s my ethical responsibility, is to deal with those kinds of things.
So since forty-eight percent say that they will leave you, and that is a big contributor to your turnover by not dealing with the stinkers who are pot stirring in your organization, that might be something that might be a great place to start.