Your business might not have a turnover problem. It might have a “one shitty individual” problem. And that individual might be you.
When employee turnover starts creeping up, the natural response is to look for a company-wide solution.
Maybe people need to be paid more.
Maybe they need better benefits.
More vacation.
More flexibility.
More engagement.
Maybe morale is low and everyone needs a team event.
Maybe pizza.
And to be fair, any of those things could help.
But if one person is making everyone around them miserable, none of those things really solve the problem.
You can increase someone’s salary by ten percent, but Monday morning still comes.
And on Monday morning, they still have to sit beside that person for eight hours.
Turnover Is an Aggregate of Individual Decisions
Businesses tend to think about turnover as a company metric.
Turnover is 12 percent.
Turnover is 18 percent.
Turnover increased this quarter.
Once you put it into a spreadsheet, it starts to look like an organizational problem that probably requires an organizational solution.
But nobody actually quits because turnover is 18 percent.
One person quits because they can’t stand working for Mike anymore.
Another quits because every interaction with Susan turns into an argument.
Another likes the company, likes the work, and might even like the pay, but their manager makes every day unnecessarily difficult.
Another finally gets tired of dealing with the owner.
Those are individual decisions caused by individual experiences.
Eventually enough of them happen that someone puts them into a spreadsheet and calls it a retention problem.
Then the company starts changing policies instead of examining the culture that produces better decisions about the actual cause.
Meanwhile, Mike is still sitting there.
Sometimes the company doesn’t need a better retention strategy. It needs to deal with Mike.
Owners Experience Employees Differently
There is another problem that makes this difficult to see.
As an owner or leader, you don’t experience your employees the same way their coworkers do.
You tend to see them vertically.
You see whether they get results.
Whether they’re reliable.
Whether they answer your calls.
Whether they solve problems.
Whether they make money.
Whether they seem committed to the company.
Whether they’re good at their job.
And there’s nothing wrong with looking at people that way. Part of leadership is evaluating whether someone is contributing to the organization.
But the people working beside that employee experience them horizontally.
They sit in meetings with them.
They listen to them complain.
They get interrupted by them.
They have their ideas dismissed by them.
They wait three days for an answer from them.
They clean up after them.
They deal with their temper.
They hear what gets said when the boss leaves the room.
Those are very different experiences.
An owner can genuinely think:
“Sarah is one of our best employees.”
Meanwhile, everyone who works beside Sarah can genuinely think:
“I don’t know how much longer I can work with Sarah.”
Both can be true.
The Parent Perspective
Parents probably experience a version of this all the time.
Imagine your kid comes home from school and tells you they answered every question in class, corrected the teacher twice, and explained to another student why their answer was wrong.
As the parent, you might be kind of proud.
Your kid is smart.
They’re confident.
They’re paying attention.
They’re not afraid to speak up.
Maybe you even think they’re showing some natural leadership ability.
Now imagine sitting beside that kid for six hours every day.
You might come up with a different adjective.
The parent isn’t necessarily wrong.
The classmates aren’t necessarily wrong either.
They’re experiencing the exact same person from completely different positions.
The same behaviour that looks like confidence from one perspective can feel like arrogance from another.
The behaviour that looks like initiative to the boss can feel like controlling behaviour to a coworker.
The person who always “gets things done” for the owner may accomplish that by bulldozing everyone around them.
This is why evaluating someone only through their relationship with leadership can give a very incomplete picture.
Is This Person Good for the Company?
Owners naturally ask:
“Is this person good for the company?”
But there may be another question worth asking:
“What does this person do to everyone else in the company?”
Those aren’t necessarily the same question.
Someone can be productive, technically excellent, loyal, responsive and hard-working while still making the organization worse.
Imagine an employee who personally creates $500,000 of value every year.
On paper, they look fantastic.
But suppose their behaviour makes five other good employees 20 percent less effective. People avoid asking them questions. Meetings become defensive. Information doesn’t move properly. Good ideas don’t get raised because nobody wants the argument.
Then two good employees eventually leave because they’re tired of dealing with them.
How valuable is that employee now?
Businesses are usually pretty good at measuring individual output. They’re much worse at measuring organizational drag.
A salesperson can have the highest sales numbers and still make the sales department worse.
An engineer can be the smartest technical person in the room and still drive away three other good engineers.
A manager can hit every target while slowly destroying the team underneath them.
The spreadsheet may identify a top performer.
The people sitting around that person may tell a very different story.
Sometimes the Problem Is the Manager
This becomes even more consequential when the person causing the problem has authority.
If a difficult coworker can make someone’s job unpleasant, a difficult manager can affect almost every part of their working life.
Their workload.
Their schedule.
Their opportunities.
Their compensation.
Their ability to make decisions.
Their confidence.
Even whether a small mistake becomes a normal conversation or the worst part of their week.
And yet managers are often evaluated by the people above them, not the people below them.
The owner sees that the department is performing.
The employees experience how that performance is being extracted.
Those are not always the same thing.
A manager may be delivering strong numbers precisely because they’re burning through people, even while trust has to be earned through behaviour every day.
If every two years the department needs an entirely new staff, eventually it may be worth considering that the employees aren’t the recurring variable.
The manager is.
And Sometimes It’s You
There is one more person who has to be evaluated from this perspective.
You.
This is probably where the exercise becomes uncomfortable for owners.
It’s very easy to read an article like this and immediately think of somebody else.
Most of us can probably identify the difficult person in a company pretty quickly.
It’s considerably harder to seriously consider whether everyone else has identified us.
Owners have the same perspective problem as everyone else, except perhaps amplified.
You experience your own behaviour through your intentions.
Your employees experience it through its consequences.
You might think:
“I have high standards.”
They might experience:
“Nothing I do is ever good enough.”
You might think:
“I move quickly.”
They might experience:
“The priorities change every three days.”
You might think:
“I’m very involved.”
They might experience:
“I’m not trusted to make a decision.”
You might think:
“I’m direct.”
They might experience:
“I get embarrassed every time something goes wrong.”
You might think:
“I push people because I know what they’re capable of.”
They might experience:
“I dread talking to the owner.”
The strange thing is that both descriptions can sometimes be true.
Your intention doesn’t automatically invalidate their experience.
And their experience doesn’t automatically mean you’re a terrible leader.
But if enough good people keep leaving, eventually the pattern deserves more than another engagement survey.
Leadership Isn’t Always the Best Seat for the Founder
Sometimes the answer is changing your behaviour.
Sometimes it’s becoming more self-aware.
Sometimes it’s bringing in someone who is better at managing people.
And sometimes you may actually have to remove yourself from a leadership position for the company to grow.
That doesn’t necessarily mean leaving the company.
A person can be an excellent founder and a terrible manager.
They can be brilliant at sales, product, engineering, strategy or vision and still be the wrong person to manage 50 employees.
There is no rule saying that because you own the company, you must also be the person everybody reports to.
In fact, holding onto that role simply because you’re the owner can eventually become one of the things limiting the business.
The company may have outgrown your ability to manage it long before it has outgrown your ability to contribute to it.
Those are different things.
Change Where You’re Standing
Every once in a while, it may be worth mentally moving around your organization.
Don’t just ask:
“What do I think of this employee?”
Ask:
“What is it like to work beside this employee?”
Then:
“What is it like to work for this manager?”
And eventually:
“What is it like to work for me?”
That perspective can reveal things that performance reviews, turnover statistics and engagement surveys sometimes miss.
You can pay people more.
You can increase vacation.
You can improve benefits.
You can organize team events.
You can buy all the pizza you want.
But if everyone still has to come in Monday morning and spend eight hours with the person making them miserable, you haven’t fixed the problem.
Your business might not have a turnover problem.
It might have a “one shitty individual” problem.
And every once in a while, it’s worth considering whether that individual might be you.
