The quality of an organization’s leadership and their employee turnover rate are intrinsically linked. Bad leadership begets a high rate of employee churn.
Turnover doesn’t just happen. It is the result of leadership mistakes, misguided strategy policy or neglect. The latter is perhaps the greatest of the three sins. When turnover is tied to a culture of tolerating poor performers, a remarkably common cause, there is simply no good excuse in the CEO’s next job interview. Moreover, when a leader makes mistakes, the best employees are typically the first to look elsewhere because they have more options. Or as Travis Bradberry, PhD, wrote in a weekend edit of the HuffPost, “If you can’t keep your best employees engaged, you can’t keep your best employees. While this should be common sense, it isn’t common enough.”
Global technology and insight firm CEB found that fully one-third of star employees feel disengaged from their employer and are already looking for a new job. There research is, regrettably, not an outlier.
This is one of corporate America’s biggest unreported costs. No wonder executive recruiters are increasingly scrutinizing a CEO’s track record in this critical aspect of their leadership.
CEOs who lack the top-of-mind awareness of this important performance metric, or who cannot provide a plausible reason for the turnover, will face a tougher hill to climb in securing their next assignment. This is particularly true in fields like healthcare services where controlling costs, reducing readmission rates, and enhancing patient satisfaction are now essential performance measures.
CEO candidates should be forewarned that this is a metric that will be scrutinized by recruiters. When it comes to employee turnover, there may be a good reason why it happened but good excuses are few and far between.
Join me for our Podcast on Wednesday when we will look at eight common bad mistakes that make good employees quit for a better job. You can listen on our web page www.johngself.com/self-perspective , on LinkedIn or our company Facebook page. You can subscribe to Self-Perspective on iTunes.
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