Why More Than 40% of Their People Were Leaving (Part 1: Expectations)

"Our managers don't know how to hire good people."

That's what the CEO of a growing company in Frederick told me. More than 40% of their people were leaving every year.

My first question was simple: what does "good people" mean here?

I spent time with the managers, the employees and the CEO. What I found wasn't one problem. It was several, and no single fix was going to solve it.

Over the next few weeks I'll walk through what we changed. Turnover ended up under 20%.

The first piece was expectations.

Up and down the company, nobody was clear on what was expected. Not the CEO's expectations of the managers. Not the managers' expectations of their teams.

That's where the hiring problem started.

If you don't know what a good employee looks like, how can your managers hire the right people?

When I walked the CEO through what I'd heard, the nodding started. The disconnect was suddenly easy to see.

Think about it from the inside.

• What does my boss expect from me?

• What does doing my job well actually look like?

When people can't answer those questions, frustration builds. On its own, that doesn't make people quit. But it makes everything else that's wrong a lot harder to put up with.

So here's a question for CEOs. Ask each of your direct reports:

"What does doing your job well look like?"

Then compare their answers to what you would have said.

I've seen this play out at company after company. The answers are rarely what the CEO or manager expected.

Next in this series: trust.