Employee Quit Their Bosses, Not Their Jobs.

If employer  want to keep the most talented members of their team, it’s time to look in the mirror and realize the biggest reasons why talented and experienced employees quit  you.

Here they are the important reason for the quit:

•     You’ve overloaded your best people with too many responsibilities.  At a lot of companies in America, there have been waves of layoffs over the past 6 years.  In cut after cut, there’s a constant job staffing question: how do we get the same amount of stuff done with fewer employees to do it? The simple answer has been to get the remaining employees to do the jobs of 2 or 3 old employees, in addition to the regular job responsibilities they used to have.  And then a lot of bosses never revisited staffing responsibilities 3 or 4 years later.  It’s time to take a fresh look at who’s doing what in your group and probably redistribute how work is getting done on the team.  Your best people need to be doing higher level stuff, not just getting lower level stuff done.  Your best people will quit if they’re just continuing to be asked to do the same boring stuff years later.
•     You’re a micro-manager.  A lot of bosses get promoted because they’re perfectionists.  They were able to get a lot of work done in their old jobs to get noticed.  Now, in their new jobs, they keep wanting to make sure that whoever’s doing their old job is doing it just as well as them.  Plus, they are into all their direct reports’ business as well.  Having your fingers on the pulse of what’s going on (or not going on) in your group is good management.  But, at some point, you cross the line into micro-managing.  Your worst people are probably happy for you to tell them what to do constantly.  But your best people will be driven up the wall by this tendency.  They want to know you give them a task and then enough rope to let them do it rather than doing it for them.
•     You’re never around.  The opposite of a micro-manager is a drive-by manager.  This is the boss who’s perpetually never in the office.  They’re not around.  They don’t check in.  They give you a job to do and then check back with you 3 months later on if it’s done yet.  Lots of bosses protest that they have an “open door policy” for their people to come in and talk with them whenever they need to.  But, if you’re never around or – when you are – you zip in to grab something off your desk and zip back out or get on a conference call for an hour and then take off to a meeting, that’s not going to invite a lot of your staff to come in and shoot the breeze with you.
•     You’re not in touch with how some of your hires or promotions are driving your best people nuts.  It’s human nature to want to be around other people we like and trust.  Why would we choose to be around – and hire – people we dislike and don’t trust?  However, we usually like people who like us.  Even though we think we’re good at spotting people sucking up to us, it’s awfully tough when you’ve got a direct report telling you how great you are.  Big problems arise when we promote based on who we like instead of on merit.  One promotion or hire like that is ok, but two or three can sabotage a team’s morale.  If you’re out of touch with who’s really talented on your team and who you’re promoting or hiring, it’s a matter of time before your best people tender their resignation. Why stick around if the bozos get promoted?
•     You’ve never given your people a sense of where they can go in their careers.  Nobody takes us aside out of college or even in business school and teaches us how to sit and talk with our direct reports about upward career progression.  As a boss, most of us just want to make sure all our work gets done.  But how much do you care about getting that next promotion? It turns out that your people care about it just as much. So take the time to talk to them individually. Ask them where they want to go in their careers – it turns out many won’t have a clue but will appreciate you showing an interest.  Talk to them about how they can get there, including what kinds of experiences and successes by them would make them stand out to your bosses.
•     You run terrible meetings.  Even one of the most successful CEOs in the world today, Google GOOGL -0.39%’s Larry Page, wasn’t born with a keen understanding or respect for being a good boss as this account describes.  Page – a recent doctoral student at Stanford, when he started Google – thought the ideal way to run meetings was to instigate a big argument among a team.  Whoever had the best idea, he thought, would rise to the top.  Instead, he created anarchy and a lot of hurt feelings.  There are plenty of other way to run ineffective meetings including never calling them or letting them go on and on with no real action items coming out of them.  All these approaches are tremendously morale-sapping.
•     You communicate that you care more about yourself than the team.  As a leader, you’ve got to show your reports that you have done in the past or would be willing to do now anything that you’re going to ask them to do.  If you seem above it, you’re likely going to turn their support away from you.  You’re going to communicate to them that you care more about yourself than you do them.  It’s tough to win back their support after that.  So, show them that you care about their career progression more than your own. Show that you want the team to win more than you want you to win.
•     You’ve never given them the big picture vision of where your group is heading or you are constantly changing the big picture.  Some bosses are great at strategy but they’ve got their head stuck in the clouds or like to change the group’s strategy every quarter.  Some bosses are about as strategic as a banana.  Either extreme is bad and debilitating for your staff.  As a boss, you’ve got to tell the group where their North Star is, the direction they’re heading in and why.  Then, you’ve got to give them everything they need to get there.  Sometimes business conditions change and the strategy changes, but that should happen infrequently.  If you worked for yourself as a direct report, what would you think of the strategic direction you’re setting?

It’s not too late. Before your best people quit and join the other 2.5 million Americans who will this month, why don’t you take control as a boss and prevent that from happening?

Analyze Your Boss

Most managers want to know how to manage certain of those more problematic staff: the chronic dissenter; the demotivated clock-watcher; Job’s comforter; the neurotically fragile. A great deal of time and effort, energy and worry go into trying to understand and motivate direct reports to be productive.

But the really smart manager spends as much time managing upwards. By definition, your boss has greater power and status than you. Bosses may or may not have broader wisdom and more experience but (nearly) always they have more power and influence and certainly more command of resources. They certainly are likely to have a great influence on you promotability, bonus pay and, indeed, quality of life.

Really shrewd managers learn to handle their bosses. The success of this strategy depends entirely on an understanding of the individual concerned. And this is much trickier than understanding reporting staff because managers mostly have much more data on those below them than those above them. Often, managers chose their direct reports; they have access to their files; they may even have valuable psychometric test information on their personality and motives. They certainly have much more daily contact with them. The quality and quantity of data that managers have is often extensive, while a remote (physically or psychologically) boss may be very difficult to know. Managers probably have up to 50 times more contact with their staff than with the bosses who maybe in a different building, city, even country.

But what are individual bosses really  like? What are their ambitions and values? Who do they most admire or loathe in the organisation? How do they manage upwards? And what pressures are they under? What rewards do they most value – promotion, bonuses, education, time off? What gives them most stress? Are they themselves high flyers or ceiling reachers? Are they totally trustworthy? And, even, are they sane?
A simple but effective way to begin managing upwards is to understand the abilities and personality of one’s manager.
A. Ability
How bright is your boss? Ignore qualification, rank and reputation: in assessing bosses, the question to ask is how fast they are on the uptake? How quickly and accurately can they comprehend a report? How good is their vocabulary, written skills and articulateness? Can they “tumble-numbers”, read a balance sheet? The real test is in the unfamiliar, not the familiar. It’s called fluid intelligence. Experience leads to crystallised knowledge, but is only really useful in a stable world.

Those with bright bosses (that’s IQ not EQ) may find them a little intolerant of those less quick and perhaps poor at explanation. Reminding them of this can be done in a flattering way and may help everybody. These bright sparks tend to be more accepting of change, more interested in data and, of course, more adaptable and flexible.

Below-par bosses may take particularly sensitive handling. They resist new ideas and are frightened of bright young things from university. The really dim ones don’t even know that they are dim. They need a lot of help and support. Give them “suggestions” and show them how to do things. But don’t make them too reliant on you… they may hold on to you too hard and prevent your progress if they need you too much.

B. Personality

There are essentially five personality traits that require close attention. 

The first is perhaps the most tricky and almost a taboo to talk about. It’s neuroticism or, if you prefer, "negative affectivity". The stable boss copes with stress well, but the neurotic boss can be anxious, moody, thin-skinned, touchy and brittle, always pessimistic and worrying. Neurotic bosses are often unpredictable and need constant help, reassurance and calming down. They can have self-defeating characteristics that need looking out for, lest they defeat you as well. Neurotics are supersensitive: to the environment and others’ feelings. In that sense, they can be very compassionate, but their sensitivity makes them prone to low self-esteem, guilt, hypochondriasis, even obsessiveness.

The best way to manage these bosses for you own mental health is frankly to leave them. The cost of being a part-time therapist may be simply too high a price to pay.

The second important characteristic is extraversion. Extraverts are active, expressive, impulsive and sociable. They can also be risk taking, showing a worrying lack of reflection and responsibility. They are prone to make mistakes; to trade off speed for accuracy; to have too many brainstorming groups and parties; and to search for the elusive break through. Extraverts need not have their enthusiasm dimmed, but they need watching. They need to have their impulsivity tempered by more considerate judgment. But they also need lots of stimulation and variety to keep them comfortable.

Introverts are not shy, inadequate: they just don’t have the need for excitement that extraverts show. They tend to be more difficult to read because they prefer not to go to parties or meetings or give talks. They think first, speak later (unlike extraverts, who do it the other way around), and may seem slow and ponderous. They may seem cold, but that is just their discomfort around others.

Introverts trade off speed for accuracy. They may be helped by having an extroverted spokesperson. They prefer listening to talking and have a preference for “cold” over “hot” media: they prefer letters to meetings; emails to brainstorming sessions. Understand their likes and dislikes and you become more trusted and liked yourself.

We all like our managers to be conscientious: to be efficient, organised, reliable, responsible, dependent, thorough and prudent. Often they make the same demands of us, which can be a little exacting. But they get things done. Conscientiousness is a predictor of business success. It comes from upbringing and values. It is related to the work ethic and one’s conscience.

Conscientious managers can be rather tight-fisted and intolerant and they can be risk-adverse. But beware imprudent managers. They are lax with time, money and their personal responsibilities to others. They don’t follow through. They don’t pay their bills and they can be wildly incautious about all monetary and security issues. They may take time off when it suits them and be both indulgent and impulsive. They may appear as if they feel that ‘the problem with instant gratification is that it takes too long.'

An imprudent, unreliable manager needs watching. They need lots of backup… but ultimately they probably need managing out of the organisation… for everyone’s benefit.

The fourth personality dimension of salience is agreeableness. Highly agreeable managers are lovely: they are appreciative, forgiving, generous, kind, trusting and sympathetic. Their staff experience them as altruistic, modest and straightforward. Needless to say, they are well liked and have a reputation for being a good manager.

Those low on agreeableness are much less likeable. They may be cynical and sarcastic, argumentative and challenging, inconsiderate, suspicious and unhelpful. They tend to want to be admired and to be “somebody”. Their vanity and habit of putting people down make them unloved, unrespected and quite simply disagreeable. If their disagreeability is matched by great abilities, they may be forgiven their unkindness’s. But it is more likely that disagreeable managers get where they are through lies, nepotism or exploitation. If any of the latter, the best strategy is to leave or get them out of the way.

The fifth personality dimension of importance is one clearly related to creativity and intellect. It’s called openness to experience. Managers who score high on this dimension tend to be artistic and curious, imaginative and insightful, original and creative. Typically, they have a wide range of interests and are quite “intellectual”. Often, they are thought of as unconventional and a bit “arty-farty”. They like variety and novelty, but can scatter resources. For some, they are impractical dreamers: optimistic, energetic but unfocused.

Open managers are not fuddy-duddy. They embrace changes and are sensitive to the teachings and ideas of others. They are also aesthetically sophisticated. Some jobs call for little imagination and in those they are a handicap. But the real pains are managers who score low on this dimension. They tend to express both discomfort and perplexity in reaction to novel experiences. Their rigidity and lack of curiosity can be misunderstood as resistance. To help the less open manager, one needs to provide practical suggestions and new ideas. He or she needs to be helped to be more attentive to what is going on around them. They have an impoverished fantasy life and very conventional ways of thinking and behaving. Those scoring very low on this dimension are very hostile to new ideas, but those mid-way may come really to appreciate the new ways of thinking that you feed them.