Is Poor Leadership Tanking Your Retention Initiatives?

Is your company struggling with low employee engagement and high turnover rates?  If so, POOR LEADERSHIP might be the root cause of the problem you are facing.

Let me ask you, have you had a poor manager? What happened to your work, initiative, and attitude? Exactly! Work quality diminishes, productivity decreases, and attitudes take a turn for the worse. Have you left a job because you had a poor manager? Your company’s employees should be focusing on the advancement of your company goals, not on their manager. 

Today’s business environment is changing rapidly. In order to compete, it’s crucial for companies like yours to develop strong leaders that not only rise to meet daily challenges – but also motivate a team around them to do the same. 

Employee engagement increases dramatically when the daily experiences of employees include positive relationships with their direct supervisors or managers. The relationship between managers and employees directly affects how employees feel about their work and accounts for 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores.

Behaviors of an employee's direct supervisors that have been correlated with employee engagement include:

The Gallup "Q12," which are 12 core elements that link strongly to key business outcomes. These elements relate to what the employee gets (e.g., clear expectations, resources), what the employee gives (e.g., the employee's individual contributions), whether the individual fits in the organization (e.g., based on the company mission and co-workers) and whether the employee has the opportunity to grow (e.g., by getting feedback about work and opportunities to learn). 

• Employees enjoy a good relationship with their supervisor.
• Employees have the necessary equipment to do the job well.
• Employees have authority necessary to accomplish their job well.
• Employees have freedom to make work decisions.

The challenge is, research suggests that most businesses aren’t doing enough to prepare their new managers to lead their teams, with 40% of managers reporting that they received less than two hours of managerial training. A few hours of training for one of the most important positions in a company isn’t enough.

Leadership can make or break employee happiness and retention! Many organizations promote their best-performing employees to management and leadership positions, believing that they will naturally make good leaders. The art of leadership must be learned, and poor managers are often those who have had no training in leadership – excelling at task execution does not translate to excelling at leading and engaging your people.The bottom line is that employees will leave if their boss does not deliver a workplace in which they feel respected, appreciated, and challenged. People want to do work they enjoy, with greater autonomy and accountability. They want to develop careers, and benefit from professional advancement.

• Motivating all employees to perform and expressing a compelling and clear mission and vision
• Being assertive when it comes to handling resistance and mishaps
• Cultivating accountability
• Developing trusting, open relationships
• Staying away from internal politics and making decisions based on productivity

The same study found that 82% of companies employ managers that do not possess the above talents, but that doesn’t mean these skills can’t be learned. Investing in leadership development can be one of the most effective ways to increase your employee engagement and retention scores.

The bottom line is, if the problem of poor leadership is not addressed in your organization, you will continue suffer the workforce consequences, such as low productivity, lack of engagement, and poor retention.

So, if your organization experiencing high turnover rates, I invite you to sign your managers up for Leadership Coaching to help them increase personal effectiveness and ability to achieve your business results. This small investment in improving leadership capability of your key people can produce big savings to your company's bottom-line through improved engagement and retention.

Sign Up for Leadership Impact Program here

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