Every leader has a number they track for employee turnover, but almost none of them track the number that predicts it.
That number is the Dream Deficit – the gap between what an employee wants for their life and what their current job is actually giving them. It’s invisible on a spreadsheet and It shows up nowhere in an engagement survey. To often, it’s not even on a manager’s radar to understand it.
And it is, more often than compensation, the real reason your best people leave. START paying attention to that number and you’ll immediately see a transformation in your team and manager’s engagement.
It’s the difference between building a high functioning team and having your high potentials leave.
Why turnover isn’t the problem, it’s the symptom
Nationally, 70% of employees report being disengaged at work. That’s not a small, manageable minority, it’s the overwhelming majority of the people sitting in your meetings, answering your emails, and quietly deciding whether this job is still worth their best effort.
More concerning, is that 78% of managers are disengaged, disgruntled, and disinterested in their work. Now, that’s a recipe for a disastrous culture.
Disengagement rarely announces itself. Long before someone updates their resume, they’ve already started closing the emotional distance between themselves and the company, doing just enough to stay employed, not enough to stay invested.
By the time turnover shows up in your HR dashboard, the gap that caused it has usually been widening for months.
Where the gap comes from
Often times, it’s from the old school of leadership. Other times, it’s from a lack of prioritization and focus from many managers.
The first style believes that a company pays for eight hours of work, and whatever happens in someone’s life outside that window is treated as irrelevant to the business. Sure, the old way is an efficient way to run payroll, but it’s a terrible way to keep people.
The latter style hasn’t yet realized that their number one responsibility is to prioritize the development and growth of their people. They’re still operating as a technician as opposed to a leader.
The irony is that most companies already know these two styles exist, which is why so many turnover fixes default to compensation. It’s an easier fix to address the gap with higher pay, better benefits, more PTO, than it is to change the behavior and performance of their leaders.
But, those are not the things individual contributors and managers need. They want growth. The want to know their employer is invested in who they’re trying to become, not just what they can produce this quarter.
What closing the gap actually looks like
Companies that take this seriously don’t run a generic “employee wellness” initiative. They get specific about what individual people want for their lives; a certification, a home, time with a growing family, a career path they can actually picture, and they build a structured way to support it.
Our guest this week on Shedding the Corporate Bitch, Kevin Patrick of Trinity One Consulting, talked with us about the math behind the impact of not doing this well.
One case he highlighted involved a company with a 58% turnover rate in a single sales department of roughly 400 people. That is more than 200 lost every year, most earning six figures. Once you account for recruiting costs, ramp-up time, and the loss of institutional knowledge that walks out the door with every departure, the annual cost of that gap runs into the tens of millions.
When considering that financial impact, almost any investment in coaching, training, dream creation, pays for itself many times over.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE HERE
Where to start
Start narrow.
Pick your three highest-value employees, the ones you’d struggle most to replace, and ask them, specifically, what they want for their life outside this job. Have a conversation with them. A genuine, caring discussion, not just a tactical problem-solving session.
If their honest answer is “no, not needed, all is good”, it’s most likely where your next resignation letter to come from.
KEEP IN MIND – it starts with you as a leader, long before you go to address it as a team. What do they need that you may not be delivering?
If you’re not sure, start to look at what gaps in your leadership could be impacting engagement, with our Leadership Gap Diagnostic. It’s 25 statements, takes 10 minutes to complete, and provides you a powerful starting point that will transform you and your team.
Once you complete it, schedule a one-on-one deep dive coaching session to dig into your results and put together an action plan that will have you immediately moving forward and elevating your team’s engagement and your leadership. BOOK HERE
Bernadette Boas is an executive leadership coach, founder of Ball of Fire Coaching, and host of Shedding the Corporate Bitch. She has coached 400+ executives across Fortune 500 and high-growth organizations over more than 25 years in corporate leadership.
