I just read a great article quantifying the old adage, ‘people join companies and leave managers!’
The results of a five year study suggest that a rise in line manager quality by one unit (on a scale from 1 to 5) reduces the likelihood that an NHS hospital trust employee will quit their job by approximately 17 percentage points. This result appears to be driven in large part by whether the employee perceives his or her work as being valued by the manager, and by whether managers take into consideration employees’ opinions.
We often find a strong link between the quality of leadership, engagement and metrics such as turnover, sick leave, accidents and incidents, customer engagement and productivity when we analyse engagement surveys.
We ask participants on leadership development programmes what they could do to improve their scores by one point. This a powerful way of getting them to ‘shrink’ the problem and think about some small things they could do to improve. I suspect if we asked them what they could do to reduce turnover intensions by 17% that might seem a much harder goal but the end result may be the same!
