If you ask 100 human resource professionals why people leave, 90 will probably answer that “employees leave supervisors, not companies.” Twenty years ago that may have been true, but newer studies are finding that such thinking wrong. It’s NOT just the boss anymore: Successful talent retention requires a company-wide commitment to full engagement.

I was browsing slideshare.com this week in search of statistics on employee engagement, and discovered research done in 2007 on what makes employees quit. Its still-timely conclusions confirm what I have seen through personal experience -- Company performance drives away talent more than bosses do.

The Boss is not a villain, but merely an actor in this play.

A good boss can have a great impact on talent retention, but he or she is no longer the driving factor in what motivates a person to stay or go.

“While acknowledging the importance of the manager, we should not lose sight of other key factors that impact an employee’s attitudes and loyalty toward an employer. Many companies have placed so much faith in the supervisor’s impact that they neglect other organizational factors that might impact performance, engagement, and retention. By blaming the manager for lost talent, they miss opportunities to make an impact at the enterprise level,” wrote report authors Anna Erickson and Sally Blecha.

Why is the boss less critical? There are a number of reasons:
- Bosses turn over. Corporations often rotate middle managers every two years or so. ‘Bad bosses’ can be survived if a person likes their job and their company.
- Younger generations feel strongly that their work must have social value, which a company can deliver, but a boss not so much. For this group, supervision was the least important reason influencing their decision to leave a company, while the company’s image was the most important consideration.
- People no longer plan on staying with one company “for life,” if the work itself isn’t engaging and fulfilling they move on
- More employees interact with customers, and a steady drumbeat of complaints can sour a good employee on their company.
- A good boss cannot make up for bad corporate practice.

A great insight: Employee engagement beats satisfaction as a retention tool.

“In a recent study, Questar found that although job satisfaction and employee engagement were correlated, employee engagement was a better predictor of intent to leave. Regression analysis indicated engagement was twice as predictive of intent to leave as job satisfaction alone. Engagement is a much better measure of employee commitment than general measures of satisfaction,” Erickson and Blecha note.

Why?

“Satisfaction” doesn’t capture passion. Engagement includes satisfaction but also includes “involvement” in decision-making, and enthusiasm. “Engagement typically includes people doing what they do best, with people they like, with a strong sense of psychological ownership for the outcomes of their work,” say the authors.

Here’s a quote that sums up my own life’s work as a corporate mindchanger: “The foundation of employee engagement is based on improving employee performance.” Absolutely true, and a critical concept that you need to instill in senior management.

If you accept that engagement has a strong impact on retention, and you agree that engagement impacts an employee’s feelings about the company’s mission and direction, it should not surprise you that “the organization’s performance has a growing impact on engagement, and therefore retention.” The authors cite two studies:

- In a study of employee attitudes with 35 companies over eight years, Schneider (et al. 2003) demonstrated that organizational success (as measured by Return on Assets and Earnings per Share) was a key driver of overall job satisfaction and employee engagement.

- Questar found that the impact of senior leadership outweighs the impact of the immediate supervisor on employees’ feelings of engagement and their intent to remain with the company. In fact, during the course of collecting and analyzing employee survey data for over 20 years, a visible shift in employees’ perceptions of leadership at various levels has been observed.

“Forget my boss. Do I believe in this company?”

Employees who were highly likely to leave were most likely to respond negatively to items that dealt with the company’s image and the employee’s perceived “fit”:
- 85% had no pride in working for the company
- 79% didn’t see how their job related to company goals
- 70% felt their personal values were not aligned with company values

What to do?

Take the lead in fostering a culture of full engagement all the way up the management chain! It is clear that one boss is not the whole engagement process. All levels of ‘boss,’ up to the top must be perceived as committed to listening to, respecting and developing the contribution of all workers.

What one senior manager does has a far greater impact than the actions of a junior supervisor. When a talented person decides to leave, it is likely that managers at higher levels have created a culture that the employee cannot live with.

I found a lot to like in this study. I hope you find it as affirming and enlightening as I did. Let me know. I would love to hear your perspective. You can comment on this article, or reach out to me directly at dave@bovo-tighe.com.

David Tighe has been helping companies re-engage their employees for twenty-three years as a principal for Bovo-Tighe, LLC. Bovo-Tighe helps organizations solve leadership, productivity, and hiring challenges using its MINDCHANGE™ and Organizational Transformation processes, which have been market- tested in hundreds of real-world business situations. Contact Dave at dave@bovo-tighe.com.