Who Drives Retention Success? Gallup Says Your Team Leaders

Gallup® is a leader in information and known for its public opinion polls that provide analytics and insights that I find to be of high value and regularly cite in my own work. Jim Clifton, is CEO of Gallup®, and I read everything Jim writes, including one of his book’s that contains a most interesting subtitle.

The book’s title is It’s The Manager, and here are those words below the title: Gallup® Finds That The Quality of Managers and Team Leaders Is The Single Biggest Factor In Your Organization’s Long-Term Success

Purposeful to Call Out Team Leaders for Retention

Jim’s including “team leaders” here is very purposeful, as he makes clear in the book. But candidly, that isn’t news to us. Two recent clients come to mind, both in manufacturing, where in one case the top manufacturing executive over nine plants made the unilateral decision that team leaders would own retention goals and conduct Stay Interviews with their teams. The opposite decision was made in the other company, that those supervisors who manage the team leaders would take on those responsibilities.

Which decision was better? And did that decision matter a little or a lot? The organization that leveraged team leaders cut turnover by greater than 30%, while the other company saw much smaller reductions. Having managed both engagements myself, that’s how I know that the decision to anoint team leaders with all of the leadership responsibilities for our project was the major difference-maker.

The Simple Reason Team Leaders Should Drive Retention

The argument for is simple: team leaders are in their employees’ faces every day, providing instruction, feedback, and building relationships. The argument against goes like this:

• Team leaders are on the clock, so they really aren’t supervisors
• Team leaders haven’t been trained to manage people
• Team leaders are only there because our real supervisors are spread too thin

Or this one: team leaders were chosen because they were the best workers but that doesn’t make them legitimate supervisors.

But now switch your viewpoint angle to that of your teams. They know none of the usual objections, but just that this person is my boss. This is the person I discuss over dinner each night, good or bad, and this is the person I must please each day. Employees don’t care about titles, on-or-off the clock, or how much training their boss has. The boss is the boss.

Whatever the Title, Direct Supervisors are Key Retention and Engagement

This goes far deeper than manufacturing, too, and hospitals come to mind. Nurse managers on average supervise 69 nurses, spread across multiple shifts. So, charge nurses were created to bridge the gap, to be available to answer questions and maybe do scheduling. When I visit a friend in a hospital, I always ask their nurse when they last had an individual meeting with their manager and the consistent answer is, “The last time I screwed up.”

Our hospital clients say nurse managers should be accountable for turnover and conduct Stay Interviews, despite their impossible spans of control. Yet those very nurses they are trying to retain are talking with and getting feedback from their charge nurses every day…so these charge nurses are playing the “team lead” role and likely have the greatest impact on each nurse’s retention and degree of engagement.

To cut turnover and improve engagement with the majority of workers in your company, first-line leaders matter most…regardless of what you call them.

You Can Cut Turnover by 20% or More By Putting Team Leaders in the Driver’s Seat for Retention

Schedule a conversation with me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com to discuss your employee retention roadblocks and I’ll share ideas for how you can move forward and what is working for other companies to cut turnover by 20% and more by building trust through Stay Interviews and retention accountabilities.